#849: Chatting with EJ Dickson
In this installment, Jordan sits down with Rolling Stone senior writer EJ Dickson for a chat about online media literacy and fake "Karen videos."
Sept. 15, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
57:29
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and George. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| This is Jordan, again without my co-host Dan. | ||
| However, today I am joined by the senior writer for internet culture at Rolling Stone, E.J. Dixon. | ||
| Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the episode today. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| I reached out to you specifically because you wrote a piece in The Rolling Stone about a proliferation of fake Karens. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Could you kind of explain what it is that those are? | ||
| You want me to explain, like, what a Karen is? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| The fake version. | ||
| Like, the videos that are being pushed around, if I understand them correctly, are people staging acts of Karen-ness. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I spend a lot of time on TikTok. | ||
| For my job. | ||
| And I would say my For You page is very wide-ranging as a result. | ||
| Like, I get a mixture of a lot of different kinds of stuff. | ||
| And the one thing that I started noticing I was seeing a lot of were these videos of, it was always white women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, freaking out. | ||
| at largely service workers, but also, you know, occasionally just like strangers on the street. | ||
| There were a lot of like parking and driving altercations. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| views, which didn't surprise me too much in itself because TikTok, especially as a platform, really prioritizes like outrage inducing content. | ||
| There's really, there's nothing more reliably outrage-inducing than a video of a Karen going apeshit on somebody. | ||
| But what did surprise me a little bit was that the videos were clearly fake. | ||
| They were staged, they were clearly scripted to some degree. | ||
| They were clearly taking place on a set because there was nobody else in the videos. | ||
| And that was very unusual considering a lot of them took place at a restaurant or someplace where you'd expect a lot of people. | ||
| The sound was perfect. | ||
| The acting was not great a lot of the time. | ||
| That's how you know it's fake. | ||
| Yeah, and it didn't take a genius to figure it out. | ||
| And also, it was really easy to figure it out. | ||
| You would just go back to the account sharing. | ||
| Sharing the videos, and it wasn't easy. | ||
| It might take a couple steps, but it wasn't easy. | ||
| It was pretty easy to find the source of the videos, and you would see the same actor appearing over and over again in various sketches. | ||
| But in these specific ones, the idea is they're portraying these as real. | ||
| They're not giving you anything other than your own deductive abilities to suggest that these are staged, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Essentially, yes. | ||
| It does get a little complicated because I have covered in the past some of these accounts that create these types of viral content will have a disclaimer on the original video saying, like, this is just a comedy sketch. | ||
| platforms by multiple different times of meme accounts with that disclaimer taken away. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, right. | |
| So even if there's sort of like and this wasn't this case on this for this particular video, but even if there's sort of like an initial cursory attempt to. | ||
| To, like, include a disclaimer or say, hey, this is not real. | ||
| Like, there's sort of, like, a knowledge that that disclaimer is not going to be included in reproductions of the video. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's almost, like, a laundering process wherein they make the original video, put this little, we don't believe that we're going to get away with this if we don't lie, but then other accounts, which may be operated by them, too, realistically, you know, will put it out without that. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good way to describe it as a laundering process because they know that these videos are going to be picked up by these very high engagement meme accounts. | ||
| The one that I talk about in the piece is this account called Crazy Karens, which is on Twitter and has something like 500,000 followers. | ||
| And they know that it's going to be completely devoid of context when it's shared there. | ||
| So it's sort of just a way to be like ethically responsible in quotes while simultaneously like ensuring the content goes as viral as possible by knowing because you know that context is Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I find it wild that we still allow people to get off on, like, demon-style technicalities, where it's like, aha! | ||
| No, I signed this in blood, so you can't do anything to me. | ||
| Like, we know what you're doing. | ||
| You're clearly doing this. | ||
| Well, people don't. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| They don't know what they're doing. | ||
| The vast majority of people in the comments thought that it was a legitimate video. | ||
| They were like, let's find her. | ||
| Let's find the actress playing. | ||
| Not the actress. | ||
| Let's find Miss Karen. | ||
| Let's out her. | ||
| Is there a GoFundMe for the waiter that she's harassing in the video? | ||
| They had absolutely no idea. | ||
| There were a couple comments that were like, this is fake, but the vast majority took it totally seriously. | ||
| That's a really good question. | ||
| Is there a GoFundMe? | ||
| For the actor? | ||
| Maybe there should be. | ||
| No, no, I mean that very seriously. | ||
| Is there a grift here as well? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I mean, I'm not talking just about they're laundering these fake videos, but are there supports that people donate money to? | ||
| Or is it just engagement? | ||
| I have seen no evidence that there is grifts like that. | ||
| You know, like that they're directing. | ||
| Trying to direct funds to a specific fake resource or something like that. | ||
| I believe it is just for engagement. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is, you know, it could be read as a type of grift in itself. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Oh, no, it is. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not like a direct, you know, there's no direct monetary fraud at all that I can see from any of these types of accounts. | ||
| Because, I mean, we cover Infowars, so the engagement we understand, but we've also got that added level of the grift is always on, you know. | ||
| You're always selling something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that's very interesting. | ||
| But what I... | ||
| I mean, I've got so many different kind of notes about this. | ||
| Like, the first thing that I want to talk about is that there's something people are getting from watching these videos, you know? | ||
| And we can talk about it just being outrage, you know, being able to, like, get mad. | ||
| But there's a million different things we get mad at all the time. | ||
| What is it about these videos specifically, I feel like, that people are engaging with? | ||
| Well, I'm not a psychologist. | ||
| I take it with a grain of salt. | ||
| But I think there are a couple things going on. | ||
| I think there's a lot of misogyny. | ||
| The first thing I was going to say is I think people hate women, but go for it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's usually, that's the explanation for like 95% of the time why something goes viral. | ||
| It's like, oh, it's because people hate women. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's, I could talk for hours and hours and hours about like the subgenre of like airplane. | ||
| Like, tweets about, complaining about, like, kids and moms on airplanes that absolutely fit into that category. | ||
| But yeah, I think there's a very substantial undercurrent of misogyny. | ||
| These are all women. | ||
| These are all women having very public, for the most part, yeah, there are, like, one or two exceptions. | ||
| And it's not like... | ||
| And it's not like men aren't capable of that kind of behavior. | ||
|
unidentified
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I watch dudes do that shit all the time to servers. | |
| Yeah, dudes are pieces of shit all the time. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah, it's all white, middle class, usually older women. | ||
| So I think that there's a lot of misogyny that's specifically targeted towards women who are not deemed of having value, like a certain type of sexual value in society anymore. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| I also think that among people of color who share these videos, there's a very understandable feeling of... | ||
| It's about time these white ladies have it coming. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's a lot of outrage over white women weaponizing their tears and their outrage in using it against people of color and lower income people. | ||
| And I think that that fuels a lot of it. | ||
| Like, the very understandable outrage at that phenomenon. | ||
| So I think it's those two things, like, sociologically. | ||
| But I think even more importantly than that, it's, like, the one impulse that trumps both of those things is that it's bloodsport. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's internet bloodsport. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, how can we hold somebody accountable? | |
| How can we, you know, make sure that we get this person fired? | ||
| How can we make sure we make this person's life as difficult as humanly possible for being such an asshole in public? | ||
| I mean, those were the majority of the comments that I saw. | ||
| And the thing is, like... | ||
| If it's not true, if the person is an actor, if it's just an engagement player, then there is no accountability. | ||
| There's nobody that can be held accountable. | ||
| This is just a piece of content that is specifically generated to capitalize on your sense of righteous indignation. | ||
| But that's primarily what I think it appeals to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, the question then that follows is, does that then kind of like... | ||
| Defuse or delegitimize whenever somebody is actually behaving terribly. | ||
| You know, like, if you're giving me such vehement criticism for this fake video, and you're, well, I mean, honestly, there's a certain part of me that says what that does is actually decrease the ability of anybody to actually address it. | ||
| You know, if you feel like... | ||
| Talking shit on this fake video is what you need to do in order to fight against this type of behavior, then why would you actually do something in real life? | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| You're delegitimizing these jokes. | ||
| I'm not sure I understand. | ||
| Are you saying that the fact that these videos are fake delegitimizes the real abhorrent behavior that's castored in authentic Karen videos? | ||
| Will it be used in that sense? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I'm cool with that answer. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, just because people don't care. | ||
| People don't care if something's fake. | ||
| That's really what I've learned in covering the internet. | ||
| People really don't care what the truth is. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| That's ultimately secondary to the idea that people can coalesce behind a given narrative and join in behind it. | ||
| And I'm not saying that... | ||
| That's not an argument against, like, cancel culture. | ||
| And I put cancel culture in quotes. | ||
| Like, that's not an argument against, like, the process of using the internet as a tool for holding people accountable when they behave badly. | ||
| Like, that's not what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm just saying that I think we're at this point in internet culture and in our culture in general where the truth behind a given story or, like, the context is just... | ||
| Completely immaterial. | ||
| Like, I really do feel that way. | ||
| So, no, I don't think anybody particularly cares that these videos are fake. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| And I don't think anybody will care. | ||
| I think that probably what's going to happen is we're just going to see more and more and more of them. | ||
| And the boundaries between what is legitimate and what is staged for clicks and for outrage are just going to completely collapse. | ||
| I think that's very much the direction we're moving in. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| So, I mean, you're saying that eventually all forms of outrage will be staged for us and then delivered to us through social media platforms. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in addition to, like... | ||
| I mean, that's a very fun idea. | ||
| In addition to, like, you know, the actual Karen videos, like, yeah, yeah, I just don't think that anybody cares really about the distinction. | ||
| How far does it go? | ||
| You know, what's the escalation? | ||
| Will there be staged cop assassinations? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, are we... | ||
| Where is the escalation? | ||
| And is there a portent in this kind of behavior that can tell us? | ||
| I mean, I kind of think it's already happening. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I regularly... | ||
| I can't even think of one specific example because it happens so often. | ||
| I regularly see at least five things on the internet every day that are fake and are easy to prove that are fake and generate a shit ton of outrage and, you know, in some cases generate entire news cycles, you know? | ||
| And the fact that I can't think of a specific one... | ||
| Well, okay, I guess one example that's very recent is the rumor that people... | ||
| At Burning Man, we're contracting Ebola. | ||
| Hadn't heard that. | ||
| I left the internet and I could not be happier. | ||
| I'm not on social media at all. | ||
| Yeah, so there were like two days where Ebola was trending on X, formerly Twitter, which is a phrase I have to, unfortunately, write all the time now in my stories. | ||
| Ebola was trending on X for quite some time because there was this rumor that seemed to have been completely just crafted out of thin air that somebody at Burning Man had Ebola. | ||
| I don't think it was covered by any legitimate mainstream media outlets because they have to follow a certain fact-checking protocol and basic reporting principles. | ||
| But it was picked up enough that it was just kind of regarded as fact within a few hours. | ||
| And this happens all the time. | ||
| That's just one minor example of something that I just see happening all the time. | ||
| And it's not a particularly new argument I'm making, I don't think, that people don't care about the truth anymore. | ||
| Or people just fashion, you know, create their own narratives, create their own agendas, so to speak. | ||
| But it's just, I just see it happening all the time. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, I mean, part of why I'm so fascinated is with our job, you know, we've looked at Alex Jones over his past 20 years, and that concept of, like, people don't give a shit about what is true or what isn't true seems like it, I mean, it didn't originate with him, but it seems like he was a proto-form of it on the internet. | ||
| At the very beginning of people not giving a fuck about reality. | ||
| There was Alex. | ||
| And so what I'm looking at whenever I see all of these different videos is the idea that it's not a grift. | ||
| You know, it's just engagement. | ||
| That seems crazy. | ||
| That seems brand new to me. | ||
| Well, it's not crazy because it's not like they're not making money off of it. | ||
| You know, they're just monetizing. | ||
| And honestly, I mean, on TikTok, which is a famously difficult platform to monetize content on, you know, you have to think that they're not making that much money off of it. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, they are making money off of it, so it's not like they're not profiting off it. | ||
| It's just a more indirect type of profiting than the type of profiting you were talking about earlier. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But, I mean, the reason that I bring that up isn't because I want them to do it either direction or anything like that. | ||
| It's that, with Alex, that extra step, you know, that extra step of not being just the person who tells you the truth. | ||
| He's also the person who sells you the shit you need to survive. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| That's kind of an extra step of evil. | ||
| That's an intent. | ||
| That's an intent to take an audience and then steal their money, basically, by selling them garbage. | ||
| And with the fake Karens, I'm fascinated because if they're not trying to then convert their audience into something else, does that mean that they're not doing it yet? | ||
| Or does that mean that this is a different type of grift? | ||
| It's just a different type of grift. | ||
| Alleged grift. | ||
| I don't think I can use the word grift. | ||
| You can't, but I'm free to do it all that I want. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't really want to be, I don't really want to say, you know, accuse them of grifting in any way, because they're not. | ||
| I mean, it's not a grift in the technical sense, but it's just a different type of attention grab. | ||
| It's just a different type of, I mean, it's all the same, really, in the attention economy. | ||
| There's not that much of a distinction between what Alex Jones is doing. | ||
| I mean, he's got a more overtly political agenda, but he's also just going on air and saying things for attention that a lot of the time he knows aren't true. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| No, no, totally. | ||
| There's not that much of a distinction. | ||
| No, no, absolutely. | ||
| But that's, I mean, again, that's what I'm kind of driving towards is this idea. | ||
| And we see it all too often with, you know, like with your wellness scams or your other types of grift is that they have suddenly started to turn towards the right wing. | ||
| They've all suddenly started turning political. | ||
| You know, we've covered natural healing people who over time after the COVID vaccine, because they're anti-vaccine, they turn into far- Yeah. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| That brings me to my next question. | ||
| Should we even be noticing it? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I mean, is it a good or is it a positive thing to share this? | ||
| To make people aware of this? | ||
| Or is this something that could just like have disappeared, have appeared and disappeared? | ||
| Oh, I got it. | ||
| And if you hadn't noticed it for a second, then it would never have been noticed. | ||
| Yeah, I get that question a lot. | ||
| And it's a question that I ask myself pretty often because I write about a lot of things that I find morally abhorrent. | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, there is a question of whether or not you... | ||
| And also I used to cover extremism and the far right far more, although I still do to some extent, like far more than I do now. | ||
| And there is always this question of like, well, are we adding more oxygen to something or platforming something that really shouldn't be... | ||
| I think it's a fine line. | ||
| But I think at a certain point, and I'm starting to... | ||
| It's really a case-by-case thing with each story that I think about covering, but I'm finding myself coming to this conclusion for more and more of them. | ||
| At a certain point, something gets so big that you can't ignore it. | ||
| At a certain point, the horse is out of the barn. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think... | |
| I think this is actually a pretty good example of that because they were getting millions and millions of views. | ||
| And they were showing up on my For You page and I'm not a person who actively seeks this kind of content. | ||
| So why is TikTok prioritizing this? | ||
|
unidentified
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So I think it's helpful. | |
| For a number of reasons, this type of coverage. | ||
| A, because I think just having increased media literacy in general is helpful, even if nobody is actually interested in having increased media literacy. | ||
| And B, to some extent, I mean, less in this specific case, because this isn't as overtly harmful as some of the other things that I've covered that TikTok has promoted. | ||
| But it puts pressure on the platforms, which play a huge role in spreading this type of content. | ||
| And ensuring that it gets as many eyeballs as possible because it increases engagement and increases time on the platform. | ||
| It's only to their benefit that these platforms implicitly promote misinformation. | ||
| So I think this type of coverage is important because it ultimately puts pressure on them and holds them more accountable than they otherwise would be to doing that. | ||
| TikTok, I think, is a particularly powerful social platform in that regard. | ||
| Because even though it's uniquely, it's supposedly uniquely tailored to an individual's interests and an individual's, like, which it is to some degree. | ||
| Like, I mean, I get tons of TikToks about, I like musical theater, I like Disney, I like Harry Styles content like that. | ||
| I get tons of, I like, you know, animal content. | ||
| I get tons of shit like that. | ||
| But it also is unique in that it... | ||
| Has the power to decide what does and doesn't go viral a lot of times. | ||
| And I'm not saying that there's somebody behind a computer deciding, okay, we're going to make this fake Karen video go viral today. | ||
| But it sees that something is about to get a lot of engagement. | ||
| It sees that something is getting a lot of engagement. | ||
| It sees that something is getting a lot of eyeballs on it. | ||
| And it will boost that because it is to their benefit to keep people on the platform. | ||
| So it's it. | ||
| Do you know it? | ||
| It has a lot of power, I guess, is just what I'm trying to say. | ||
| It's a very powerful platform. | ||
| I think people are scared of it for reasons other than why they should be scared of it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, where we're talking about it is it. | ||
| You know, TikTok isn't it. | ||
| I'm talking about TikTok, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| People, people should, people, there's a lot of discourse about, you know, about TikTok and China, and, you know, I don't, that's not what I, that's not my beat, that's not what, like, I report on. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no, I don't mean, I don't mean, I don't mean, like, any associations with the country or any political situation. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, but I'm saying that there has to be people. | |
| I'm saying that's why people are scared of TikTok. | ||
| And I'm saying, no, you should be scared of TikTok because it is an incredibly powerful source of information that actively prioritizes information that is not correct. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That is why people should be scared of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what I'm saying in response to that is that TikTok isn't just like... | ||
| And it. | ||
| Like, there's a reason that these things are happening. | ||
| There's an algorithm. | ||
| There's something that drives this engagement and forces it this way. | ||
| And I don't understand why we're not doing anything about that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the platform notoriously lacks transparency. | ||
| All platforms do. | ||
| So TikTok is not really unique in that regard. | ||
| So we don't really know how content is being promoted. | ||
| Oh, that seems really important. | ||
| We should know that. | ||
| Oh, sure, sure. | ||
| Sure, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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A lot of people agree with you. | |
| We don't really know how content... | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Like, that's why we should be scared of it, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| We should be scared of it because... | ||
| Like, A, we don't know how content is being promoted, and B, we know that what content is being promoted is often wrong or harmful in various ways. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then, I mean, that's why the way that I find it difficult to talk about it is as though it is an it, you know, as though it is an unfeeling corporate engine. | ||
| That cannot be viewed. | ||
| You know, like, there are people behind this who are doing this on purpose. | ||
| But we don't know how. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I can't tell you how. | ||
| I can't provide any insight on that. | ||
| So I find that it kind of, like, removes responsibility for the people themselves if they just go, oh, well, TikTok does this. | ||
| Why would you care if you worked for TikTok and you were writing these horrible algorithms? | ||
| If they were horrible, because it's not you, it's TikTok, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's like, do you have to call it X? | ||
| Will you get sued if you don't call it X? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I mean, well, earlier you said, you know, Twitter now known as X, or X formerly known as Twitter. | ||
| And you have to write that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because I'm a journalist and, you know, it's accurate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But, I mean, do you have to? | ||
| Will you get sued if you just say, we're going to call it Twitter? | ||
| I mean, I can't speak to that. | ||
| I just know that it is... | ||
| I know I don't like calling it X, but I know it's more accurate to call it X, verbally known as Twitter. | ||
| And as a journalist, accuracy and the truth are important to me. | ||
| And that might sound... | ||
| That might sound a little... | ||
| Like, overly virtuous. | ||
| But, you know, it's the truth. | ||
| No, I don't believe that at all. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| I'm asking because I find it strange that we... | ||
| I mean, Twitter stopped being a product a long time ago and started being a place. | ||
| A place that we called Twitter. | ||
| And I find it strange that a billionaire can just buy up a place and then say it's X now. | ||
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unidentified
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You can buy up a product and say it's X, but you can't buy up a place and say it's X. No, it's not good. | |
| I do appreciate that we're just agreeing on how things are awful. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have a lot of conversations like this. | |
| Most of my conversations with people are like this these days. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| The internet's a whole other place. | ||
| Which, again, which brings me to my next question. | ||
| Do people believe the same things on the internet that they believe in real life? | ||
| In this case? | ||
| In what case? | ||
| I mean, in these TikTok video scenarios, is this something where it's like, I am happy to believe this while I am on the internet. | ||
| I'm happy to be outraged while I am on the internet. | ||
| And the moment I put my phone down, I completely forget about all of that. | ||
| Right away. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can only speak to my own subjective experience of how I use the internet. | ||
| Tell me about how you use the internet. | ||
| It has to be strange considering you are both observer and participant. | ||
| Well, it's also extra strange in that I have a life that is totally separate from the internet. | ||
| And that is not the case. | ||
| I mean, it's the case for a lot of people who use the internet, but it's also not the case for a lot of people who use the internet. | ||
| Like, for some people, they live on the internet. | ||
| And I don't. | ||
| I have a family. | ||
| I have a partner who is completely offline. | ||
| And it's interesting, like... | ||
| The way, like, he will ask me about something that he read about in the paper that morning, and I'll be like, what are you talking about? | ||
| And then I'll bring up something that I've been obsessively focused on that's been happening online, and he'll be like, what are you talking about? | ||
| Like, it's two completely different worlds. | ||
| Like, and two completely different, like, news ecosystems, which I find fascinating. | ||
| But, um, so for me... | ||
| And also, I've been working on the internet and have been facing harassment and abuse and such for so many years that I have to compartmentalize. | ||
| I have to just shut it off and be like, I can't think about this anymore. | ||
| But that's my own subjective experience of the internet. | ||
| I don't know if that's that way for other people. | ||
| I've spoken to many journalists and people of note, all of whom that are female presenting are abused horribly on the internet pretty much constantly. | ||
| Constantly? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really quite stunning, actually. | ||
| You didn't ask this, but I'll tell you. | ||
| that the more I started to, the more that like, I started writing stuff that I was super proud of, and the more confident I felt about my abilities and my career, the more harassment I got. | ||
| It was kind of astonishing. | ||
| Basically, the moment I started working for Rolling Stone is the moment... | ||
| Well, that's actually not true. | ||
| About a year into working for Rolling Stone, when I really thought that I had hit my stride and I figured out what I wanted to write about and thought that I was doing pretty good work, that was when the harassment started increasing. | ||
| And I bet a lot of women who go on your podcast will probably say the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Whenever you... | ||
| Well, you know, the more... | ||
| How proud of your work you are, the more you want to put it out there, the more you want people to see it, and then more people see it, and then pieces of shit see it. | ||
| I guess it's just a function of visibility. | ||
| But I found it... | ||
| At first, I was like, why is this happening at a time when I think I'm doing really important and really good work? | ||
| And then I realized, oh... | ||
| It's because I'm a woman. | ||
| And it's because I'm a visible woman on the internet. | ||
| It's really not much more complicated than that. | ||
| No, we're very visible. | ||
| You can see us. | ||
| But people do not bother us at all. | ||
| When we talk about visibility, there are people who are looking for women to hurt. | ||
| They're not just looking at people who disagree with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, it's literally happening to me in my mentions right now. | ||
| Like, I won't get into it, but, like, there's literally, like, somebody called me an ugly cunt, like, an hour ago. | ||
| I don't know if you can put that on your podcast, but somebody, like, an hour ago, and I was just like, oh, somebody tweeted me who, like, shouldn't have. | ||
| And the more it happens, the more you get used to it, which has helped me just on a personal level and a pragmatic level in doing my job. | ||
| But is not really a great reflection on the state of discourse these days. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| I wonder if that is more just a matter of the internet has brought a larger number of people into proximity. | ||
| Like, would people have always been this? | ||
| I mean, people have been this misogynistic since, I assume, Neanderthals went extinct. | ||
| You know, like, is this simply an inevitable byproduct of more and more people seeing each other? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's so many things. | ||
| I think it's so many things. | ||
| I don't think it's just that, although that's definitely, like, a driving factor. | ||
| And the anonymity is a driving factor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the fact that we. | |
| That people culturally have permission to hate Jews and trans people and black people and women more than they have, you know, have been certainly within my lifetime. | ||
| I mean, it's a bunch of things, but yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, then there's really kind of one last thing that I wanted to talk about, and that is. | ||
| Why is everything on the internet Mad Libs? | ||
| Apparently Dave Portnoy is an important food critic now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What? | ||
| Everything is Mad Libs? | ||
| Those words don't make sense to me. | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| Oh, you don't watch his pizza reviews? | ||
| No! | ||
| What? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So you're telling me, like I read this and he takes one bite of a pizza and then that matters to human beings. | ||
| So what are you asking me about? | ||
| Are you asking me about... | ||
| I just want to be clear. | ||
| Are we talking about the fact that he does pizza reviews? | ||
| Are we talking about the latest thing that he got in trouble for? | ||
| Not in trouble, but the latest thing that he went viral for? | ||
| The latest thing that he went viral for, was that the... | ||
| That was the fight, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| So tell me what happened with the fight. | ||
| In full detail, please. | ||
| Well, I guess I have to explain the context. | ||
| I guess I do have to explain. | ||
| If you're saying that you didn't know that Dave Courtney was a popular pizza critic, then I guess the context needs to be explained. | ||
| Yeah, he's got this series. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, people know. | |
| He's really viral. | ||
| He's really popular. | ||
| It kind of goes back to your point earlier about something's happening on one sector of the internet that's huge and the other sector of the internet has no idea about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He does these pizza reviews. | |
| He just goes to various pizza places on the East Coast, takes a bite of pizza, gives it a highly specific grade. | ||
| And it's pretty harmless. | ||
| I actually enjoy his videos, the pizza videos. | ||
| I think they're good. | ||
| I agree with his opinions. | ||
| I grew up in New York, so I care a lot about pizza. | ||
| And even though I'm not David Portnoy's... | ||
| Target audience. | ||
| Like, I think he's a pretty good pizza critic. | ||
| Like, you know, everything he says about pizza, I'm like, yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| Even if I disagree with him about many other things, I do enjoy his pizza reviews. | ||
| So those have been pretty popular for a really long time. | ||
| And he recently went into some guy's pizzeria who I interviewed after this happened. | ||
| And this guy was like, no, I do not want this guy. | ||
| Because apparently there had been some sort of rumors circulating in the pizza community that Dave Portnoy had a lot of power, like a review had a lot of power over the success of an individual business. | ||
| And this guy was like, no, I don't want to be a part of this. | ||
| Which I understand. | ||
| I don't want to see the pizza community taken advantage of like that. | ||
| Well, he's an artisan. | ||
| He's a chef. | ||
| He feels strongly about his product, and he does not want this guy who he perceives as having too much power and influence over the pizza community in general. | ||
| He doesn't want to play the game, which I understand. | ||
| And the flip side of that, which I also understand, is that he... | ||
| You know, what Portnoy does is no different than food criticism in general, and this guy should be, like, open to that and should understanding of that. | ||
| But, like, regardless, he came out and he told him to fuck himself, and they got in a big fight, and Portnoy, like, blasted it on his social channels, and he talked about it on Tucker Carlson, and it became... | ||
| It unleashed this, like, wave of harassment against this guy. | ||
| Wait, Dave Portnoy went on Tucker Carlson to talk shit about pizza? | ||
| Not specifically for that purpose, but he talked about this guy on Tucker Carlson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, and then I assume that's because soy boy lefties don't want Dave Portnoy eating his pizza. | ||
| Are we still using those words? | ||
| What are they calling it? | ||
| Well, that's how it was interpreted. | ||
| It sort of became, it implicitly became a culture war thing. | ||
| Even though it had absolutely nothing to do with culture wars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's about the pizza community. | ||
| If anything, it was one of the more apolitical times that Dave Portnoy has been in the news in recent years. | ||
| It had absolutely nothing to do with politics, but it was interpreted that way. | ||
| In part because he talked about it on Tucker, I think. | ||
| But also because of the type of audience that Dave Portnoy has and the type of brand that he's built. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| So then I ask myself the question. | ||
| That is real. | ||
| And the fake Karens are fake. | ||
| And I don't know if there's a difference between the two right now. | ||
| I mean, sure. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Do you follow what I'm going on? | ||
| Like, would it matter if Dave Portnoy went on Tucker Carlson to talk about a fight that was staged? | ||
| Like, was that fight staged? | ||
| Was everybody in on it? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| It crossed my mind. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It crossed my mind. | ||
| I think I asked the guy. | ||
| It crossed my mind. | ||
| I don't think it was because he was very upset about the harassment against his family. | ||
| And the death threats that he received. | ||
| And he didn't want to talk about specifics. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you about specifics. | ||
| But as somebody with a family, I don't think... | ||
| I would never willingly invite that into my home and onto myself. | ||
| So I don't think it was staged. | ||
| But, I mean, to address your larger point, would it matter if it was staged? | ||
| I mean, matter to who? | ||
| Would it matter to me? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I think that the truth matters. | ||
| I think journalism matters. | ||
| You know, does it matter to Tucker Carlson? | ||
| No, I don't think Tucker Carlson gives a shit. | ||
| Tucker Carlson had on a guy who claims to have done crack with Obama and had gay sex with him in 1999. | ||
| These are claims that were discredited like 15 years ago. | ||
| Tucker Carlson doesn't care. | ||
| But do people on the internet care? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| Should people care? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I'm not the arbiter of the internet, you know? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Who is? | ||
| Do you care? | ||
| I mean, would you care if it was fake? | ||
| To me, what I see is the difference is that he's getting real-life death threats. | ||
| He's not getting comments on his posts. | ||
| He's not an actor who people are very furious with. | ||
| He is a real human being. | ||
| But the point that I was trying to make about the fake Karens is that people wanted to. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They wanted to send this person to threats. | ||
| Right! | ||
| They wanted to dox this person. | ||
| And it was a totally imaginary person. | ||
| But they wanted to. | ||
| And the only reason why a video like that exists is to capitalize on the desire to do those kinds of horrible things to a person. | ||
| Right! | ||
| Right! | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Are we training ourselves how better to attack real people through these fake videos? | ||
| Or are we just... | ||
| Or are the fake videos a better way of releasing this clear need to pile on people? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess in that, I think they're better. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They're very cynical, but nobody's getting hurt. | ||
| It's fake heroin. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they're better in that regard. | ||
| I think for a lot of people, knowing that they are fake would make them less entertaining. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Not necessarily for me, because I don't find the real ones entertaining. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, you have no interest in watching a real-life human being be a piece of shit to another real-life human being. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| I don't. | ||
| It doesn't appeal to me. | ||
| And I just always wonder what the real story is behind it for both of the people on camera. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Someone's having an awful everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's not fun. | ||
| That's not fun for me to watch that. | ||
| But it's fun for other people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's... | ||
| What is it that they're... | ||
| Are they looking to enjoy the actual abuse or do they enjoy their response to it? | ||
| Is it all tied together in some sort of weird fetish that we've created out of these Karen videos? | ||
| Again, I'm not a psychologist, so I can't speak to what goes on in the brain when people just want to be fucking assholes on the internet. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| And I want to be clear that I have a very complicated opinion about accountability culture. | ||
| I am not going to sit here and make the argument that someone... | ||
| Who verbally abuses a white person for no apparent reason doesn't deserve to be held accountable for it. | ||
| I think that there are a lot of cases, especially if somebody is being racist or abusive or harmful in some way, where it is absolutely acceptable to film their behavior and to call them out on it. | ||
| It should face consequences. | ||
| But that's with an asterisk. | ||
| I see a lot of the times... | ||
| I see, and I'm saying this more and more on TikTok in particular lately, videos of private citizens being filmed are clearly people who are mentally ill or in distress or a lot of times are neurodivergent and not picking up on social cues. | ||
| And these are, if you just took a second, I just want to be like, if you just took a second to think about What, you know, who this person is and what the context is, then you would come to that conclusion. | ||
| Or, like, you would come to the conclusion that it might be possible that they're vulnerable in this way. | ||
| So why attack them? | ||
| You know, like, why use your platform to attack somebody for clout if they are potentially, you know, really, really struggling and deeply sick? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that's not a question people are asking themselves right now. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| I see it every day. | ||
| Like, it's just not a question people. | ||
| I can name ten examples off the top of my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just not a question people are asking themselves. | |
| Yeah, that's fucked. | ||
| I mean, that's a male, you know, it's hard. | ||
| God, that's so difficult because that's... | ||
| And I don't want to say it like this, but it is the first way of viewing it that pops to a dumb comic's mind. | ||
| It's like, you guys are leaving so much money on the table. | ||
| You know, you're going straight from lying to hurting people. | ||
| You've got to start a store. | ||
| You know, you've got to sell t-shirts. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| It's fucked up because it's... | ||
| Not because, but it's just for clout. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The one example I'm thinking of, I guess I'll just talk about it, even though you didn't ask. | ||
| The one example that I'm thinking of is this video that is going viral. | ||
| It's this woman, right? | ||
| It's actually a series of videos. | ||
| And she has been filming this guy in her neighborhood who looks really disheveled. | ||
| His legs are black for some reason. | ||
| He, like, clearly hasn't showered in weeks. | ||
| Walking around her neighborhood singing to himself, singing gibberish, basically, like, you know, causing, you know, being disruptive in the neighborhood, but is clearly not well. | ||
| This guy is, like, clearly not well. | ||
| And instead of, you know... | ||
| Trying to see where this guy's family is, if he has any family, you know, getting a wellness check on him, trying to see if he's okay, if he could use any support. | ||
| This woman's reaction was to create an entire TikTok account around her crazy neighbor. | ||
| And she's got millions of followers now. | ||
| And people are, like, doing lip syncing his, like, the songs that he sings to himself. | ||
| Like, they're remixing it. | ||
| And this happens all the time. | ||
| I cannot even tell you. | ||
| How commonplace this is. | ||
| And again, because it's TikTok, I am getting these videos even though I have no interest in them. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's because they are just getting so much engagement. | ||
| And I really wish that somebody would write about it. | ||
| I don't know if I struggle with whether or not I should. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I totally understand. | ||
| It's really astonishing to watch. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| It's really fucked up. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I wish I could articulate better how fucked up that is. | ||
| That's deeply psychopathic. | ||
| That is deeply psychopathic. | ||
| And if you look at the comments, nobody says anything like that. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody's like, why are you filming this guy? | ||
| Is this guy okay? | ||
| None of the comments are like that. | ||
| It's just all... | ||
| Now, so to me, what that indicates is that the algorithm that people have designed is specifically angling towards creating a place where people who would say that's psychopathic never see that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, yeah. | |
| You know, like, it is creating a cordoned-off area of the internet where this is fine. | ||
| This is fine. | ||
| This is fine. | ||
| And this area, it's not fine. | ||
| And this area, it's not fine. | ||
| Well, no, I would actually argue that it was a cordoned-off area of the internet, but that cordoned-off area has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger because of platforms like TikTok. | ||
| Okay, now I'm interested. | ||
| Like, in the past, you know, five years ago, ten years ago, you would see the only people... | ||
| Who were sort of making bloodsport out of, you know, doxing private individuals and cruelty like that was 4chan or Kiwi Farms or places like that. | ||
| And now it's sort of... | ||
| Not only are there more forums for, like, right-wing assholes to do that, and not only are there more right-wing assholes doing that, but there's also sort of been this... | ||
| Water-down effect, I guess you could call it, where we're not just talking about doxing. | ||
| It's not just right-wing assholes talking about doxing women and trans folks because they posted a photo on the internet. | ||
| It's like they are creating... | ||
| It's like left-wing people, right-wing people. | ||
| It's totally politically unbiased. | ||
| And it's like they are creating a sort of social justification for it. | ||
| There's another example. | ||
| This is one of the cruelest things I've ever seen. | ||
| This woman, Sabrina Prater, was a trans woman on TikTok a couple years ago who would record videos of herself in her house. | ||
| Dancing. | ||
| And her house was kind of ill-kept on the surface, and it looked a little... | ||
| She was doing some construction on it, I think. | ||
| So people were taking these videos and not only memeing them and remixing them, but also accusing her of being a serial killer and calling CPS on her because she had kids. | ||
| You know, calling the police to check her basement and doing these, like, true crime-esque videos, like, dissecting her content. | ||
| It was really insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this was a poor trans woman. | |
| You know? | ||
| And these people were dissecting her life and doxing her. | ||
| But they had come up with, like, a high-minded justification for it, which is, oh, we're, you know, saving lives. | ||
| We're helping people. | ||
| And it happens all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's that's really like when I say a watered down effects like that's that's in part because that that's that's like the Kiwi farms and fortunes shit sort of trickling down to general society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I don't see that all too often as the legacy of Infowars and Sandy Hook, you know. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did Alex sent these people to harass based upon just lies and shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just to fucking make money and get engagement and draw cash his way. | ||
| So to see that it's now so democratized that it's just like the eye of Sauron is on you at all times is fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| Now anybody can be Alex Jones and abuse the rest of the human race. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| Alright, is there anything you like about the internet? | ||
| Otherwise, we're about to end this on the saddest, most miserable... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, yeah! | |
| You had to stand up and walk away from the bad energy where you were sitting. | ||
| No, no, no, I'm just putting my light on because it was getting dark in here. | ||
| Is there anything I like about the internet? | ||
| Yeah, there are a lot of things I like about the internet, actually. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I love the internet. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I have had more fun on the internet. | ||
| Like, some of the funnest times of my life have been on the internet. | ||
| I remember... | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is so specific. | |
| But yesterday... | ||
| So you know how Steve Hartwell died? | ||
| The Smash Mouth guy? | ||
| Yes, I do know. | ||
| I do know that. | ||
| Yesterday, my friend Miles Klee, who's my colleague at Rolling Stone, is like an amazing writer. | ||
| He wrote a post. | ||
| About Steve Harwell's Twitter presence and his... | ||
| He did this tweet a couple years ago that was like dunking on DJ Khaled when DJ Khaled said he doesn't go down on his wife. | ||
| I don't know if you remember it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was just like, it was an amazing dunk. | ||
| It was like a classic moment in internet history. | ||
| And I was thinking about, I was trying to think of a headline for the piece and I was like, do we frame it around like... | ||
| Steve Harwell's Twitter history, or do we frame it around this one moment that is iconic in my memory? | ||
| And I was thinking about this tweet, and I was like, I remember the exact moment where I was when I saw that tweet. | ||
| And just the joy that filled my body when I saw the tweet. | ||
| It was almost like an endorphins rush. | ||
| And I was thinking, wow. | ||
| I'm just bringing that up because you asked if there's anything good about the internet. | ||
| And yeah, I think one of the good things about the internet is that it can bring moments like that. | ||
| The internet also brings together marginalized people in a way that is sort of unprecedented in human history. | ||
| It can hold power to account in a way that's unprecedented in human history. | ||
| When harnessed correctly, the power of the internet is really something to behold. | ||
| And I think it's beautiful. | ||
| The problem is that it's just very often not harnessed in a way that I think is morally defensive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we need to find people who are really good at harnessing the Internet in the right way. | ||
| And then take over the world. | ||
| Educate people in media literacy and how to use the Internet responsibly. | ||
| And I think that a lot of... | ||
| I mean, my kids aren't old enough. | ||
| But if I had to guess, I would say that a lot of media literacy targeted at Gen Z has not been focused around, like, how to consume information responsibly or, like, as focused on misinformation at all. | ||
| I think it's probably been, like, don't send nudes, you know? | ||
| Like, I think that's the majority of, like, internet education for teenagers. | ||
| And I think that's a big problem because... | ||
| There are a lot of ways that people that age use the internet in ways that I think are irresponsible. | ||
| And if people took the time to discuss that, if educators took the time to discuss that, then I think that could help a lot. | ||
| What do I know? | ||
| I'm a childless heathen, so it is nice to know that... | ||
| People are still telling children to not be children instead of helping them. | ||
| I appreciate that a great deal. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that happens all the time. | ||
| Well, EJ, thank you so much. | ||
| This has been an absolute delight of a time. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| This was fun. | ||
| I like the tangents that we went down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was fun. | |
| That is what I'm fairly well known for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tangential, boring side notes. | |
| So, people can find you at The Rolling Stone. | ||
| Is there anywhere else that they can find you? | ||
| Yeah, you can find... | ||
| Promoting up soon. | ||
| No, you can follow me on X, formerly known as Twitter, at EJDixon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alrighty. | |
| Well then, thank you so much. | ||
| And hopefully we'll talk again soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Nice meeting you. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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