September 17, 2024 • 53 mins
In the summer of 2012, Laina Morris became an overnight viral star as the Overly Attached Girlfriend, a parody of the rampant Justin Bieber "Beliebers" of the era. The week after, she had to decide if she'd drop out of college or pursue the life of a job that didn't quite exist yet -- a full-time YouTuber.
In part 1, Jamie takes a look at Laina's ascent, and how the image of the YouTube star was first conjured from thin air by a bunch of Silicon Valley weirdos, and perfected by YouTubers themselves. Net week, Jamie speaks exclusively with Laina Morris in part two!
For more on the history of the social media algorithm, check out "The Chaos Machine" by Max Fisher: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chaos-machine-the-inside-story-of-how-social-media-rewired-our-minds-and-our-world-max-fisher/18203720
For more on YouTube celebrity, check out "Extremely Online" by Taylor Lorenz: https://bookshop.org/p/books/extremely-online-the-untold-story-of-fame-influence-and-power-on-the-internet-taylor-lorenz/19718842?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrp-3BhDgARIsAEWJ6SwYyF8sigAMNiXmi3fokHCkE2bzkcSOCaQ7nB0cdh3vmpjNcJS4rVAaAhV6EALw_wcB
Follow Laina on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@laina
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
For as long as women have existed, they've been called
jealous and clingy.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
I just want to be a part of your life.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Oh this is the way you do it. Huh, shut
it up at my appointments.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
You won't answer my calls. You change your number.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan, I'm
your number one fan. There is nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
You're gonna be justified.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'll take a good care.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm your number one fan. That was Alex Forrest from
Fatal Attraction, Annie Wilkes from Misery, and Miss Piggy, respectively, clingy, stonky,
(00:54):
obsessed by the man of their desire, while the same
can't be said in reverse, although with Kermit it's complicated.
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
(01:16):
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
(01:39):
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
(02:01):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:43):
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,
(03:05):
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,
(03:26):
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
(03:46):
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
(04:08):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
time because she has her own time?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Would you stalk her family? Would you follow her around?
Would you try to dissect her life?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Employ her online?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
There is a lady who don't know he doesn't know
you at all.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
These stereotypes around fans, women and clinginess have been with
us for a long time. And the early Internet was
no exception to this. In the front half of the
twenty tens, a fandom that was frequently mocked were fans
of Justin Bieber or the believers you really had to
be there, Hey, jag Jabay. In twenty twelve, biber Mania
(05:30):
was at an all time high. He'd been discovered on
YouTube as a thirteen year old by mega producer Scooter
Braun became a protege of Usher and released his first EP,
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,
(05:51):
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
(06:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Hey, what's up, Internet, Guess who to Justin Bieber and
I've taken over.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Fun of your die. It's mine.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I bought it and now it's Bieber or die. Anything
that's not Bieber dies.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And in many ways he was in way over his head.
In the meantime, Bieber's career continued to grow. He had
a gigantic social media following from the moment he became famous,
and in twenty ten was said to account for three
percent of all Twitter interactions. The believers flocked to all
things Bieber, including a three D concert movie that I
(06:58):
saw as a joke, so I claimed at the time,
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,
(07:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
I was trying to guess what the song would sound like.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And so it was released in March twenty twelve ahead
of the full album in June, and it shot right
to number one and just as quick aside here. Because
Justin Bieber has had a number of high profiles, scandals, incidents,
et ce, many of which I think were connected to
him not being adequately protected as a kid. This period
of time I'm talking about was before any of that.
(07:57):
Believe came out in summer twenty twelve, and there's no
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
(08:20):
out too. There was a fragrance released called Girlfriend, which
is pandering to young girls hard. In the ad copy
take a Lesson.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Justin Bieber launches his second perfume, dedicated to his girl fans.
Girlfriend Fragrance is described as flirty, personal, and inviting. Top
notes are designated to represent a chance in love and
provide an exciting splash of mandarin, BlackBerry hair and strawberry.
The heart is marked as Dream and includes accords of
(08:53):
pink Frisia, star, jasmine, apricot, and orange blossom. The bass
is a kid containing sensual notes of vanilla orchid, luminous musk,
and white amber Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
The second was a promotion called the Girlfriend sing Off Contest.
Justin announced the contest in a now lost to time
video saying the following.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
My new fragrance is called Girlfriend, and I wanted to
do this whole idea where my fans will basically take
my song Boyfriend and make it into their own girlfriend version.
Make your own version, rewrite it however you want to.
I'll pick the best one and fly that person out
to one of my concerts and have a meat and
greet and stuff. It'll be fun. So make your own
(09:42):
video right now. And I love you, I.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Freaking love you, Justin, Oh my god. So girls were
encouraged to rewrite the song Boyfriend to be called Girlfriend
Compulsive Heterostyle right twenty twelve, and in the contest, they
would sing over a karaoke track of Boyfriend, including the
weirdly long intro. Entries would be uploaded by users to
YouTube and the Beaber team would pick their favorite. Eventually,
(10:10):
I guess a person named Halle one, but no one
remembers Halle. There is but one girlfriend contestant that withstood
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
(10:33):
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,
(11:01):
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
(11:22):
you die.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She's a combination of this troped out, obsessive woman and
the obsessive fan she's so tweaked out on whoever's on
the other side of the camera that it's hindered her
ability to use her eyelids. She is Alex Forrest, she
is Miss Piggy, she is a believer, and then she
launches into her parody lyrics.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall.
Question here with yeah, I'd always call and call. I
wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you, reading
all your texts to watching everything you dog nag nag
on you. If I was you girl, old friends and
never let you leave without a small recording device taped
(12:06):
under your sleeves.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
And forty eight hours later, this clip, made by a
college student in Texas who had just gotten off a
shift at the Pack and Mail, had over a million
views and had gone viral on Reddit. They called her
the overly Attached Girlfriend aka Lena Morris and her sixteenth
Minute starts.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a
look back at the Internet's most famous characters of the
day and figure out how their moment changed their lives
and what it says about the Internet and us. My
name's Jamie Loftus and I recently co hosted a screening
of Chicken Run at a famous Los Angeles Movie Theater
in full sexy chicken drag. So, yes, my career is
(13:48):
going great. And today we are talking about one of
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
(14:12):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:57):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:32):
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
(18:53):
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,
(19:13):
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
(19:34):
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.
(19:55):
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
(20:15):
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
(20:37):
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.
(21:00):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:07):
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,
(22:29):
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
(22:51):
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,
(23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(24:00):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:14):
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.
(25:34):
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
(25:57):
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,
(26:18):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
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,
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:11):
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
(29:32):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
My mom down is really cool. Pool a bit dump,
It's really big.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
And really deep PTSD. I hated Fred, but the mainstream
was determined to make Fred work on television. This from
a Nickelodeon movie where John Cena played Fred's dad, And
of course I'm going to want to play a clip
of that dad.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
What do you think guys should do?
Speaker 3 (31:11):
The secret? It's ruthless accretion.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
It is you gotta look at yourself and say what
time is now?
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Show what kind of man you.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Really are, and for what it's worth. The actor who
played Fred, Lucas Crookshank, is still on YouTube and has
a good sense of humor about all of it. I mean,
he was a teenager at the time, but still Fred God.
But while most YouTubers flopped out of mainstream entertainment, you
also had You're justin Bieber's. And while creators were navigating
(31:41):
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
(32:03):
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
(32:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:35):
Watch time, and only watch time.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
The focus of the company was developing an algorithm that
effortlessly catered and even anticipated the desires of viewers, making
it impossible to switch to something else. Search engine expert
Christo's Goodrow, who was also working at YouTube at the time,
hold Fisher.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Our job was to keep people engaged in hanging out
with us. More watch time began. It's more advertising, which
incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
The YouTube algorithm was significantly improved throughout the early twenty tens,
using machine learning to simulate the kind of curation that
used to be done by clueless old men in boardrooms.
Now it was done by an evil computer. COO Schaslo
echoes this feeling, singling out the year twenty twelve, the
(33:26):
same year Lena Morris goes viral.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
He says, within a few months, with a small team,
we had an algorithm that increased watch time to generate
millions of dollars of additional ad revenue. So it was
really really exciting.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
YouTube was absolutely running their pre roll ads, sure, but
the real value of the company was the technology that
it used that detected down to absurd detail what you
watched and how long do you watched. It a truly
ridiculous amount of data that users were just handing over.
But as this went on, Shaslow became concerned with what
(34:03):
developing such an addictive relationship to the platform could potentially mean,
for like the world I'll quote from Max Fisher one
more time here.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
As the system honed its powers, Shilleau noticed it developing
strange habits. It began nudging lots of users to watch
videos espousing anger at women, sometimes particular women, like the
game culture critic Anita Sarkisian, sometimes women. Generally, men were
spending forty percent more time on YouTube than women were,
(34:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
And if you know anything about Internet history, you'll know
what this algorithmic tendency led to on a long enough timeline, Gamergate,
a brutal misogynist harassment can pain led mainly by male
gamers between twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, which led a
number of women in the gaming industry to be doxed,
(35:08):
to be threatened, and to fear for their lives. And
if you know any more Internet history, you'll know that
this same playbook is still used to harass marginalize people
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,
(35:34):
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
(35:57):
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,
(36:19):
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
(36:40):
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.
(37:03):
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
(37:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the
wall question here you're with Yeah, I'd always call and call.
I wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you,
reading all your texts, to watching everything you do. Nag.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And when we come back, Lena Morris gets swept up
into this triple decker cyclone clusterfuck. Maybe welcome back to
sixteenth minute. This morning, my cats are doing this thing
(38:10):
where it looks like they're having sex but they're not.
One is just sitting on the other like he's an
egg that's going to hatch. It seems like they're both
fine with it. I just don't like someone let me
know what this is. And today we're talking about one
of these seminal early celebrities of YouTube, Lena Morris, the
overly attached girlfriend. So okay, we know about the Justin
(38:33):
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
(38:54):
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?
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Of course, I'll marry you.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
I told all of your friends that you hate them.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Now we can hang out every day. That girl commented
on your status she's a slut.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Surprise. I stopped taking my birth control two weeks ago.
You get it. Jealous clinging possessive jokes from twenty twelve
and separate from Reddit, Lena goes viral on YouTube, where
you can hear the full parody song and the launch
of this character. But the upload, titled JB fan video
pulls in over a million views in its first two
(39:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Like girls justin Bieber girlfriend parody is unbelievably creepy overly
attached girlfriend and is the meme you've been waiting for, you.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Know the type of post. And by June fifteenth, twenty twelve,
Lena publicly acknowledges in a tweet that she is the
person everyone's been meaning for the last week and a half, saying.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
I'm always amused by the overly attached girlfriend tweets and
I realize my face is associated with it and I'm
slightly disturbed.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Still awesome from here on out. What is mercifully and
consistently true of this story is that everyone basically seems
to be in on the joke. It's immediately clear in
early interviews with Lena that she's doing a bit, and
while nearly every interview she does in these early days
and for years after, demands that she does the eyes
of the overly Attached Girlfriend, no one is conflating this
(40:44):
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
(41:06):
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
(41:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (41:38):
Hey, I just saw you with that lady paid for
her dinner. That's kind of shady gree remember your mind.
You say you're dating. I know you're kidding, so.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
I'll be waiting.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And this goes megaviral too, meaning the first two YouTube
videos ever made were numbers one and two on all
of YouTube. And keep in mind that in twenty twelve,
this was not an easy feat. There was a lot
of money and clout to combat with, but she was
on a roll and signed with the manager shortly after.
(42:16):
Though at twenty she wasn't exactly sure what she wanted
to do yet and wasn't ready to uproot her life
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,
(42:38):
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
(43:00):
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,
(43:23):
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
(43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:28):
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
(44:49):
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
(45:11):
the mother of your future children.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
For some reason, men love it when women make them sandwiches.
It's one of the fastest ways to his heart and
one of the best ways to make sure he'll stay
with you forever.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
But as time goes on, Lena shares more of her
own personality, formally separating herself from the character, and in
classic jump cut YouTube comedy style, would perform sketches as
herself talking to the overly attached girlfriend. And while some
of it's dated, Lena avoids a lot of the tropes
of this era of YouTube comedy. She's not screaming at
(45:48):
the top of her lungs, she isn't going edge lord.
She's making stuff that she and her audience enjoy from
week to week. And if all you have to go
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
(46:09):
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
(46:30):
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
(46:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
After about a year and a half of doing it,
I started to feel a bit depressed, and starting around
like twenty fourteen, I would say the beginning of twenty fourteen,
I sort of landed myself in a real deep depression,
(47:32):
and I was keeping it a real deep secret from
everyone around me. I felt shamed and I felt guilt
for being stressed and overwhelmed in a world and with
a job and opportunities that were so great. I didn't
understand why I couldn't handle it.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
It's a half hour long video and is uncharacteristically confessional
for Lena. She gets into topics that were far less
trendy to discuss at the time, talking about a feeling
that a lot of online creatives were starting to discuss
at this time. Earlier in twenty nineteen, writer Anne Helen
Peterson published what I consider to be a seminal essay
(48:13):
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
(48:34):
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
(48:56):
step back for her own health. Here's another clip.
Speaker 3 (48:59):
My releaseationship with YouTube, honestly, like started to become more
negative than positive. And I'm just in a place where, like,
I know, as much as I don't want to admit it,
I know that this part of my life is done
and it's time to say goodbye. How does it feel
to be broken up with by the overly attached girlfriend that?
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Anyway, The comments on this video were overwhelmingly supportive, thankfully,
and Lena did leave YouTube after that to focus on herself.
For years, she didn't leave social media completely. Occasionally she'd
post on Instagram or Snapchat. She eventually started at TikTok
when that became a thing to do, and would even
perform as overly Attached girlfriend from time to time, but
(49:44):
now it was on her terms, not the strict full
time schedules she'd enforced on herself for five years and
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
(50:06):
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
(50:27):
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,
(50:49):
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
(51:09):
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
(51:33):
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
(51:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:11):
I haven't done YouTube full time since I was in
my mid twenties, and I don't know that I ever
had a healthy relationship with YouTube. And I'm curious now,
as you know, someone who's been through it and is
older and has worked on my mental health and still
(52:34):
loves creating things and making content and connecting with you guys.
I'm really curious what that looks like when I'm in
a healthy place. I'm curious what a healthy relationship to
YouTube looks like.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
And the main takeaway of this video is she's thinking
about coming back to YouTube. Her audience, of course, was stoked,
and that was when I knew I needed to reach
out to her to better understand this very specific journey
been on and next week I speak exclusively about the
highs and lows of life online with the overly attached
(53:07):
girlfriend herself, Lena Morris. See You Then. Sixteenth Minute is
a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted,
and produced by me Jamie LASiS. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is
(53:27):
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.
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
For as long as women have existed, they've been called
jealous and clingy.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
I just want to be a part of your life.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Oh this is the way you do it. Huh, shut
it up at my appointments.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
You won't answer my calls. You change your number.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan, I'm
your number one fan. There is nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
You're gonna be justified.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'll take a good care.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm your number one fan. That was Alex Forrest from
Fatal Attraction, Annie Wilkes from Misery, and Miss Piggy, respectively, clingy, stonky,
(00:54):
obsessed by the man of their desire, while the same
can't be said in reverse, although with Kermit it's complicated.
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
(01:16):
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
(01:39):
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
(02:01):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:43):
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,
(03:05):
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,
(03:26):
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
(03:46):
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
(04:08):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
time because she has her own time?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Would you stalk her family? Would you follow her around?
Would you try to dissect her life?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Employ her online?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
There is a lady who don't know he doesn't know
you at all.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
These stereotypes around fans, women and clinginess have been with
us for a long time. And the early Internet was
no exception to this. In the front half of the
twenty tens, a fandom that was frequently mocked were fans
of Justin Bieber or the believers you really had to
be there, Hey, jag Jabay. In twenty twelve, biber Mania
(05:30):
was at an all time high. He'd been discovered on
YouTube as a thirteen year old by mega producer Scooter
Braun became a protege of Usher and released his first EP,
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,
(05:51):
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
(06:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Hey, what's up, Internet, Guess who to Justin Bieber and
I've taken over.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Fun of your die. It's mine.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I bought it and now it's Bieber or die. Anything
that's not Bieber dies.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And in many ways he was in way over his head.
In the meantime, Bieber's career continued to grow. He had
a gigantic social media following from the moment he became famous,
and in twenty ten was said to account for three
percent of all Twitter interactions. The believers flocked to all
things Bieber, including a three D concert movie that I
(06:58):
saw as a joke, so I claimed at the time,
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,
(07:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
I was trying to guess what the song would sound like.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And so it was released in March twenty twelve ahead
of the full album in June, and it shot right
to number one and just as quick aside here. Because
Justin Bieber has had a number of high profiles, scandals, incidents,
et ce, many of which I think were connected to
him not being adequately protected as a kid. This period
of time I'm talking about was before any of that.
(07:57):
Believe came out in summer twenty twelve, and there's no
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
(08:20):
out too. There was a fragrance released called Girlfriend, which
is pandering to young girls hard. In the ad copy
take a Lesson.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Justin Bieber launches his second perfume, dedicated to his girl fans.
Girlfriend Fragrance is described as flirty, personal, and inviting. Top
notes are designated to represent a chance in love and
provide an exciting splash of mandarin, BlackBerry hair and strawberry.
The heart is marked as Dream and includes accords of
(08:53):
pink Frisia, star, jasmine, apricot, and orange blossom. The bass
is a kid containing sensual notes of vanilla orchid, luminous musk,
and white amber Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
The second was a promotion called the Girlfriend sing Off Contest.
Justin announced the contest in a now lost to time
video saying the following.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
My new fragrance is called Girlfriend, and I wanted to
do this whole idea where my fans will basically take
my song Boyfriend and make it into their own girlfriend version.
Make your own version, rewrite it however you want to.
I'll pick the best one and fly that person out
to one of my concerts and have a meat and
greet and stuff. It'll be fun. So make your own
(09:42):
video right now. And I love you, I.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Freaking love you, Justin, Oh my god. So girls were
encouraged to rewrite the song Boyfriend to be called Girlfriend
Compulsive Heterostyle right twenty twelve, and in the contest, they
would sing over a karaoke track of Boyfriend, including the
weirdly long intro. Entries would be uploaded by users to
YouTube and the Beaber team would pick their favorite. Eventually,
(10:10):
I guess a person named Halle one, but no one
remembers Halle. There is but one girlfriend contestant that withstood
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
(10:33):
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,
(11:01):
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
(11:22):
you die.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She's a combination of this troped out, obsessive woman and
the obsessive fan she's so tweaked out on whoever's on
the other side of the camera that it's hindered her
ability to use her eyelids. She is Alex Forrest, she
is Miss Piggy, she is a believer, and then she
launches into her parody lyrics.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the wall.
Question here with yeah, I'd always call and call. I
wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you, reading
all your texts to watching everything you dog nag nag
on you. If I was you girl, old friends and
never let you leave without a small recording device taped
(12:06):
under your sleeves.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
And forty eight hours later, this clip, made by a
college student in Texas who had just gotten off a
shift at the Pack and Mail, had over a million
views and had gone viral on Reddit. They called her
the overly Attached Girlfriend aka Lena Morris and her sixteenth
Minute starts.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a
look back at the Internet's most famous characters of the
day and figure out how their moment changed their lives
and what it says about the Internet and us. My
name's Jamie Loftus and I recently co hosted a screening
of Chicken Run at a famous Los Angeles Movie Theater
in full sexy chicken drag. So, yes, my career is
(13:48):
going great. And today we are talking about one of
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
(14:12):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:57):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:32):
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
(18:53):
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,
(19:13):
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
(19:34):
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.
(19:55):
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
(20:15):
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
(20:37):
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.
(21:00):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:07):
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,
(22:29):
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
(22:51):
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,
(23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(24:00):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:14):
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.
(25:34):
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
(25:57):
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,
(26:18):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
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,
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:11):
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
(29:32):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
My mom down is really cool. Pool a bit dump,
It's really big.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
And really deep PTSD. I hated Fred, but the mainstream
was determined to make Fred work on television. This from
a Nickelodeon movie where John Cena played Fred's dad, And
of course I'm going to want to play a clip
of that dad.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
What do you think guys should do?
Speaker 3 (31:11):
The secret? It's ruthless accretion.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
It is you gotta look at yourself and say what
time is now?
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Show what kind of man you.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Really are, and for what it's worth. The actor who
played Fred, Lucas Crookshank, is still on YouTube and has
a good sense of humor about all of it. I mean,
he was a teenager at the time, but still Fred God.
But while most YouTubers flopped out of mainstream entertainment, you
also had You're justin Bieber's. And while creators were navigating
(31:41):
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
(32:03):
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
(32:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:35):
Watch time, and only watch time.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
The focus of the company was developing an algorithm that
effortlessly catered and even anticipated the desires of viewers, making
it impossible to switch to something else. Search engine expert
Christo's Goodrow, who was also working at YouTube at the time,
hold Fisher.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Our job was to keep people engaged in hanging out
with us. More watch time began. It's more advertising, which
incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
The YouTube algorithm was significantly improved throughout the early twenty tens,
using machine learning to simulate the kind of curation that
used to be done by clueless old men in boardrooms.
Now it was done by an evil computer. COO Schaslo
echoes this feeling, singling out the year twenty twelve, the
(33:26):
same year Lena Morris goes viral.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
He says, within a few months, with a small team,
we had an algorithm that increased watch time to generate
millions of dollars of additional ad revenue. So it was
really really exciting.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
YouTube was absolutely running their pre roll ads, sure, but
the real value of the company was the technology that
it used that detected down to absurd detail what you
watched and how long do you watched. It a truly
ridiculous amount of data that users were just handing over.
But as this went on, Shaslow became concerned with what
(34:03):
developing such an addictive relationship to the platform could potentially mean,
for like the world I'll quote from Max Fisher one
more time here.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
As the system honed its powers, Shilleau noticed it developing
strange habits. It began nudging lots of users to watch
videos espousing anger at women, sometimes particular women, like the
game culture critic Anita Sarkisian, sometimes women. Generally, men were
spending forty percent more time on YouTube than women were,
(34:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
And if you know anything about Internet history, you'll know
what this algorithmic tendency led to on a long enough timeline, Gamergate,
a brutal misogynist harassment can pain led mainly by male
gamers between twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, which led a
number of women in the gaming industry to be doxed,
(35:08):
to be threatened, and to fear for their lives. And
if you know any more Internet history, you'll know that
this same playbook is still used to harass marginalize people
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,
(35:34):
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
(35:57):
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,
(36:19):
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
(36:40):
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.
(37:03):
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
(37:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
If I was your girlfriend, I'd drive you up the
wall question here you're with Yeah, I'd always call and call.
I wouldn't call it jealousy, just looking out for you,
reading all your texts, to watching everything you do. Nag.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And when we come back, Lena Morris gets swept up
into this triple decker cyclone clusterfuck. Maybe welcome back to
sixteenth minute. This morning, my cats are doing this thing
(38:10):
where it looks like they're having sex but they're not.
One is just sitting on the other like he's an
egg that's going to hatch. It seems like they're both
fine with it. I just don't like someone let me
know what this is. And today we're talking about one
of these seminal early celebrities of YouTube, Lena Morris, the
overly attached girlfriend. So okay, we know about the Justin
(38:33):
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
(38:54):
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?
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Of course, I'll marry you.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
I told all of your friends that you hate them.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Now we can hang out every day. That girl commented
on your status she's a slut.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Surprise. I stopped taking my birth control two weeks ago.
You get it. Jealous clinging possessive jokes from twenty twelve
and separate from Reddit, Lena goes viral on YouTube, where
you can hear the full parody song and the launch
of this character. But the upload, titled JB fan video
pulls in over a million views in its first two
(39:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Like girls justin Bieber girlfriend parody is unbelievably creepy overly
attached girlfriend and is the meme you've been waiting for, you.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Know the type of post. And by June fifteenth, twenty twelve,
Lena publicly acknowledges in a tweet that she is the
person everyone's been meaning for the last week and a half, saying.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
I'm always amused by the overly attached girlfriend tweets and
I realize my face is associated with it and I'm
slightly disturbed.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Still awesome from here on out. What is mercifully and
consistently true of this story is that everyone basically seems
to be in on the joke. It's immediately clear in
early interviews with Lena that she's doing a bit, and
while nearly every interview she does in these early days
and for years after, demands that she does the eyes
of the overly Attached Girlfriend, no one is conflating this
(40:44):
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
(41:06):
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
(41:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (41:38):
Hey, I just saw you with that lady paid for
her dinner. That's kind of shady gree remember your mind.
You say you're dating. I know you're kidding, so.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
I'll be waiting.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
And this goes megaviral too, meaning the first two YouTube
videos ever made were numbers one and two on all
of YouTube. And keep in mind that in twenty twelve,
this was not an easy feat. There was a lot
of money and clout to combat with, but she was
on a roll and signed with the manager shortly after.
(42:16):
Though at twenty she wasn't exactly sure what she wanted
to do yet and wasn't ready to uproot her life
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,
(42:38):
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
(43:00):
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,
(43:23):
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
(43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:28):
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
(44:49):
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
(45:11):
the mother of your future children.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
For some reason, men love it when women make them sandwiches.
It's one of the fastest ways to his heart and
one of the best ways to make sure he'll stay
with you forever.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
But as time goes on, Lena shares more of her
own personality, formally separating herself from the character, and in
classic jump cut YouTube comedy style, would perform sketches as
herself talking to the overly attached girlfriend. And while some
of it's dated, Lena avoids a lot of the tropes
of this era of YouTube comedy. She's not screaming at
(45:48):
the top of her lungs, she isn't going edge lord.
She's making stuff that she and her audience enjoy from
week to week. And if all you have to go
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
(46:09):
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
(46:30):
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
(46:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
After about a year and a half of doing it,
I started to feel a bit depressed, and starting around
like twenty fourteen, I would say the beginning of twenty fourteen,
I sort of landed myself in a real deep depression,
(47:32):
and I was keeping it a real deep secret from
everyone around me. I felt shamed and I felt guilt
for being stressed and overwhelmed in a world and with
a job and opportunities that were so great. I didn't
understand why I couldn't handle it.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
It's a half hour long video and is uncharacteristically confessional
for Lena. She gets into topics that were far less
trendy to discuss at the time, talking about a feeling
that a lot of online creatives were starting to discuss
at this time. Earlier in twenty nineteen, writer Anne Helen
Peterson published what I consider to be a seminal essay
(48:13):
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
(48:34):
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
(48:56):
step back for her own health. Here's another clip.
Speaker 3 (48:59):
My releaseationship with YouTube, honestly, like started to become more
negative than positive. And I'm just in a place where, like,
I know, as much as I don't want to admit it,
I know that this part of my life is done
and it's time to say goodbye. How does it feel
to be broken up with by the overly attached girlfriend that?
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Anyway, The comments on this video were overwhelmingly supportive, thankfully,
and Lena did leave YouTube after that to focus on herself.
For years, she didn't leave social media completely. Occasionally she'd
post on Instagram or Snapchat. She eventually started at TikTok
when that became a thing to do, and would even
perform as overly Attached girlfriend from time to time, but
(49:44):
now it was on her terms, not the strict full
time schedules she'd enforced on herself for five years and
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
(50:06):
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
(50:27):
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,
(50:49):
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
(51:09):
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
(51:33):
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
(51:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:11):
I haven't done YouTube full time since I was in
my mid twenties, and I don't know that I ever
had a healthy relationship with YouTube. And I'm curious now,
as you know, someone who's been through it and is
older and has worked on my mental health and still
(52:34):
loves creating things and making content and connecting with you guys.
I'm really curious what that looks like when I'm in
a healthy place. I'm curious what a healthy relationship to
YouTube looks like.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
And the main takeaway of this video is she's thinking
about coming back to YouTube. Her audience, of course, was stoked,
and that was when I knew I needed to reach
out to her to better understand this very specific journey
been on and next week I speak exclusively about the
highs and lows of life online with the overly attached
(53:07):
girlfriend herself, Lena Morris. See You Then. Sixteenth Minute is
a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted,
and produced by me Jamie LASiS. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is
(53:27):
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.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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