Taylor Lorenz: Prestige is complete bullsh*t
The tech columnist and ‘Extremely Online’ multi-hyphenate on political memes, the attention economy, and User Mag
I was sitting on a Fijian beach when I saw Phil’s message.
“She is in the news today,” he wrote, amid a flurry of links.
NPR. The New Yorker.
“She” in this case is journalist . Observer of all things tech and culture. Occasional lightning rod. And, as of last week, independent content creator, following a departure from The Washington Post.
Before departing on our honeymoon, I had let slip to Phil that I was sitting on an interview with Taylor.
“It’s under embargo,” I told him, half joking “Very hush-hush.”
As I sat watching the Listerine-coloured water crash on the shore, however, I wondered if maybe I had let myself be scooped.
When I reached out to Taylor a few weeks ago, I had no idea that her time at The Post was drawing to a close, or that she was about to go all in on her Substack publication, User Mag. I was simply looking to chat with one of the industry’s most prominent young journalists.
In a decade marked by shrinking reader subscriptions and diminishing ad revenue, Taylor’s career has often felt like a case study for millennials in the media biz. Proof that people under 35 can find success at legacy publications, but that they sometimes do so to their detriment, opening themselves up to online hate and harassment that many organizations are ill-equipped to handle in the best of circumstances.
While certain comment sections will tell you Taylor is the biggest hack since Geraldo Rivera — a self-absorbed “Internet Character,” who called President Biden a “war criminal :(”1, and who continues to take COVID extremely seriously — people I know and trust see her as a “talented reporter and kind person”.
And so I decided to get Extremely Online.
Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, revealed Taylor to be a thoughtful agitator, someone who seems determined to disrupt the noble profession, encouraging journalists to treat the world’s biggest news organizations with caution, or outright apathy.
Famously private (Kyle Chayka’s excellent coverage of Taylor’s career move notes she keeps her exact age a secret), Taylor asked that we keep some of the personal details mentioned at the start of our chat off the record.
We started at the most obvious point of interest: our shared appreciation for California, where she now lives.
It’s not a scoop. I’d argue it’s something better.
ES: I would pick L.A. over New York most days of the week.
TL: It’s so nice. I have space here. I didn’t have that in New York.
ES: Are you in a house?
TL: Yes, a very tiny one. But even just having a deck feels luxurious.
ES: Outdoor space feels like a real premium, especially after the pandemic.
TL: 100%. Are you Canadian originally?
ES: I am. I’ve been Canadian all my life. Laughs.
TL: It’s nice there. One of my friends just moved to Toronto. I was talking to him yesterday. He got a job and moved there. Apparently it’s fun up there. I think it’s freezing. I have no interest in ever living there, but he seems to like it.
ES: I enjoy living in Canada. I just wish we had more media jobs. It’s so limited compared to what is available in the States. But overall, it’s great.
TL: Plus America is falling apart at all times.
ES: I was wondering whether this election feels different to you at all, particularly with how it’s playing out online. The last one felt so doom-y to me. Where are you at with everything?
TL: Oh, it feels doom-y now. It feels like we’re in hell. Laughs. What’s different this time is that everything is crumbling, and there are so many horrible systemic problems in America, and no one is addressing them. Both political candidates are arguing about who loves Israel more, or who's more Conservative and who's going to be harder on immigrants. Most people, especially young people in America, just want to have health care, you know? It feels very dystopian, and I think that’s the vibe online, too. The Harris campaign is giving this 2016 energy, leaning hard into the internet and meme content and stuff, but not having any deep policy initiatives or policy departures from Joe Biden. And Donald Trump is just being his usual self. He’s hyper online. It’s dark. I think everyone under the age of 40 is very black-pilled on politics.
ES: My partner was scrolling Twitter after the first debate and we agreed that everything is horrible, but the memes are pretty good, which sort of sums up the discourse.
TL: That’s everything. You’re laughing while the world burns.
One thing I’ll say is that the Kamala campaign is very aware of the importance of the Internet. Everyone in Washington, D.C., recognizes that they need to use it but they don’t know how to wield it. They’re still stuck in 2012. Political people are always living ten years behind us. I think Kamala Harris’ team is trying to fix that. There are a lot of smart young people working on that team. But fundamentally, as a candidate, you know… It’s a weird vibe.
ES: Is there any way for Kamala’s team, or Trump’s, to better understand the Internet and to incorporate it in a way that feels more seamless?
TL: Well, Trump has always understood the Internet. That’s part of how he got himself elected.
ES: Do you still feel like that’s the case? I feel like the Internet’s moved on without him.
TL: I agree. I think he’s just gotten really old and doesn’t have the same juice he used to have. I also think he is so singular – he’s not good at building a coalition of supporters around him. He has to be the star of the show at all times. You see him doing things like picking J.D. Vance because he doesn’t want the threat of Marco Rubio or someone else stealing his thunder or becoming his successor. He doesn’t want to pass the torch.
ES: Is there anywhere fun for you on the Internet at the moment? I feel like we’re roughly the same age, and can remember a simpler time online.
TL: I think it’s fun, or at least as fun as it can be… I love TikTok, I watch a lot of great YouTube videos, and I’m on a lot of Discord servers with friends. It’s not all miserable.
ES: I feel like Discord is the one area where I’m getting left behind. I don’t really understand it or how to navigate it. I don’t know what they’re up to over there.
TL: You don’t play video games?
ES: Not really.
TL: I got really into Discord because I was playing a lot of Fortnite in 2020 during the early pandemic days. I spent a ton of time in different Discord communities with the people I was playing with. Some of them are my closest friends now. It’s like Slack but more fun.
ES: Discord communities are walled off, right?
TL: Yeah, there’s no search or discovery. It’s invite only. It’s nice to have a space free from the terrible internet trolls that dominate some of these other platforms.
ES: On that note: do you feel like your trolls have gotten better or worse since moving away from legacy media?
TL: Good question… When you're in legacy media, you can’t do anything with the attention you get online. It’s so annoying. If Tucker Carlson, or if some right-wingers are coming after me with a bad faith attack I can’t leverage it the way I would when I’m working independently. Now I can leverage that attention for my own gain, I can use that clout to direct people back to my own channels and bait people into promoting them. That attention is valuable. I don’t mind dealing with a ton of hate as long as I can capitalize on it.
In legacy media, you’re not allowed to do that. They want you to be silent and not respond and never engage and enable these people to railroad you and control the narrative. It’s frustrating. It ends up harming your reputation and you don’t get any attention. One thing I love about having more freedom is not having to worry about that stuff in the same way.
ES: You’ve always covered creators, but I noticed in the past few weeks that you’ve been writing more about creator rights.
TL: Yeah, because I’m really fed up with everything. That’s why I’m leaning harder into my Substack. I feel we’re at a tipping point. I think this election and a few other things have clarified a lot of this stuff for me. One is that I was credentialed as a content creator at the DNC this year… If I had to pick the media that I most identify with, it’s the more independent media ecosystem, which I’ve always operated in, to varying degrees. In 2017, when I decided to write full-time, I ended up doing a lot more for these legacy media publications because they were trying to position themselves as authorities on Internet culture. I think I believed that they could do that. Laughs.
At the time, the independent media ecosystem was not mature enough that I could do it at the scale that I wanted. Now I feel like it's flipped completely. Legacy media is struggling when it comes to online culture stuff and internet culture stuff. They don’t understand the dynamics of the content creator industry. It’s booming and it just keeps accelerating. I’m not going full Bari Weiss and saying we need to destroy legacy media, or whatever. I believe we need journalism in this country and, unfortunately, the only places with serious resources are these institutional media companies. I don’t think they should be destroyed… I think they need to change and evolve. Right now, they haven't done that. They’re still operating like it’s 1996. It’s untenable. They are ceding more and more ground to the far right. I think that they are fundamentally unprepared to navigate today’s attention economy.
If you are a high-profile journalist, especially covering online culture or anything involving the Internet and attention, the relationship starts to benefit them more than you like. Legacy institutions get a lot more from me being a staff writer than I get from them. If I’m going to do just one job, my feeling is that needs to change.
My main advice is don’t ever rely on prestige. Prestige is complete bullshit.
ES: You’ve essentially gone from being one employee at a large company to running your own new media business. You shoulder more responsibility, but you also have the potential to see more direct benefits
TL: And it’s not even all about benefiting me directly. It's also just about reaching people. I want to speak directly to my audience, I want people to be able to engage with me directly. It’s hard to do that if you’re at an institutional, full-time job… You don’t need any institutional gatekeepers in media to build an audience, break news, and make an impact. Some of the most influential reporters working today are not full-time staffers. You no longer need to rely on these larger outlets for distribution. That's just not how the Internet is set up in 2024.
I think Substack is great because it allows you to reach your audience slightly more directly through email. It's also less algorithmic and it doesn’t have the level of censorship or restrictions on what you can say. I very notoriously have so many problems with Instagram and Meta and have had my accounts shut down on there before for community guidelines violations, really just for speaking about the news. A lot of these other platforms, including even Twitter, have become incredibly hostile to journalists. Substack has always taken a stand against overzealous community moderation. I appreciate that.
ES: I know it’s still the early days of User Mag but what advice do you have for someone who might also be looking to break out on their own?
TL: My main advice is don’t ever rely on prestige. Prestige is complete bullshit. It doesn’t matter to anybody except the dumbest people alive. I’m so serious. These people that go to journalism school, it’s like they're brainwashed into believing that these big-time, institutional names matter. They don’t matter. They have declining relevance. You never want to align yourself with an old system. The only time you should engage with these prestige media companies is to use them. I think that’s true for anyone. No company, no matter how benevolent you believe them to be, will ever have your best interests at heart. This is true for all creative industries, but particularly in media. Some of the most talented journalists I know have been laid off, and I just think it’s important for people to protect themselves… You can’t give these places any respect.
ES: Given you are leaning into Substack, I wonder if you read ’s essay “The Machine In The Garden”? To me, that is the defining moment of the platform, at least so far. It’s the thing that made Substack seem like something bigger than an email delivery system, or an X.com knockoff.
TL: I felt the same way. I think it was the first piece of viral content on Substack. And what’s so crazy is that no one outside Substack was talking about it. It was this huge moment. I thought people were saying such smart, interesting things about the current state of media and I kept waiting for some of the legacy outlets to cover it. It raised so many interesting points.
ES: I was surprised at how many people seem to be projecting a narrative onto that essay that I thought didn’t exist within it. It really blew my mind that people’s main takeaway seemed to be “Emily is saying I can’t be a writer on Substack.” Like, I don’t think that was the point she was trying to make.
TL: It wasn’t. I think people took it really personally. I was talking to some other Substack writers about it, and some of them who were upset were people who write personal essays. They already sort of feel like an underdog or they already maybe don’t feel like a “real writer,” so when somebody writes something like this it triggers them in a way. She didn’t say anything that offensive in the essay but it struck a chord. I really liked what she wrote, and I thought she was correct. The only part I disagreed with her on was the bit about Tumblr. She wrote, “I think a certain set of millennial women think they miss Tumblr, but they really miss that specific moment of anonymity and creation on the Internet.” And I think that’s half right, in the sense that for myself and a lot of other people on Tumblr, it was not anonymous. For those of us who developed personal brands on Tumblr or originally broke out on Tumblr through our own names and our voices, that feels a little backward. But I don't think she was really around for the blogging era, so I get it. I think her critique is more of 2014 Tumblr maybe than 2008 Tumblr, if that makes sense.
ES: The thing that Tumblr had that Substack is missing, in my opinion, was that sort of sexy coolness to it. I don't feel like that exists on Substack at all. I’m not saying the platform needs to get more porn-y, but there was something edgy about it in a way that didn’t involve any Nazis.
TL: I agree and I think that goes back to what Emily was talking about. Substack is a place to monetize your content. And that results in a very different mix of content than if the point is self-expression and artistic expression. That’s what Tumblr was for. It was about community and connection.
Taylor Lorenz is the founder of UserMag.co and the author of author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. She lives in Los Angeles.
While she believes all U.S. presidents are war criminals, the term’s use here is also a reference to Lucy Dacus’ response to President Barack Obama including a Boygenius song on one of his summer playlists.