the dress

In 2015, the world was gripped by one question: is this dress black and blue, or white and gold? No, no, I refuse to argue with you about it — but the story of The Dress is the dying breath of a pre-algorithm driven social media, the peak of Buzzfeed, and contains some dark truths about the internet.

Featuring interviews with Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz), author of Extremely Online and Max Fisher (@maxfisher22), author of The Chaos Machine. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coal zone media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Clickbait. If I had to define it, clickbait is a
combination of fake news and a freak show. It was
a sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in
the Western world and an early symptom of where American
journalism finds itself. As I record this, major newsrooms are
shuddering or vastly reduced during an election year, and most
major newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting

(00:28):
in the remaining papers running on people pleasing fumes that
encourage their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity.
Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad,
which is something people in the present always say. Ten
years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days
of twenty twenty four as we enlist our third graders

(00:48):
in the water Wars. But for now, it's true. The
clickbait culture of the mid twenty tens was alarming, it
worse annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in
quite the same way. The word clickbait was a runner
up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in
twenty fourteen, tied with normcore and mansplain, and if there's

(01:09):
a more twenty fourteen sentence than that, I am not
aware of it. Here are some major headlines you can
find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails? We
have some guesses. The gritty Power Rangers reboot with James
Vanderbeek is the stuff of nightmares. Thirteen unconventional things to
do with your gallantine This year you know garbage, And

(01:31):
you can't say I'm being mean because these are headlines
I wrote. Come with me if you dare to. Twenty fifteen.
The Big Short Steve Jobs, the movie the Boring One,
not the hilarious Ashton Kutcher one. Fifty Shades of Gray.
We're at peak, justin Bieber peak. Fettiwop. The year of

(01:53):
hotline bling and Hamilton. Obama is rounding out his second term.
It's the year he allows in air strike on a
children's hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across
the US this June, and ten days after that, a
dumb bitch named Donald Trump will go down and escalator
in New York and announce he's wunning for president. I

(02:15):
have managed to graduate from college as semester early, and
in fighting for my life at my first proper writing
job at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become
relevant to this story, is writing clickbait. Or that's not
totally right, because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe building.
I ate my grilled Jesus among them, but very rarely

(02:37):
was I writing actual news. For the most part, I
was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required
original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and
was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed.
Boston dot Com was the Globe's hyperlocal sister site, and

(02:58):
a now defunct vertical call, BDC Wire was their clickbait site.
I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating
the site with stories as if there were ten writers,
and in twenty fifteen, I worked two full time jobs,
first at this now defunct website, as well as co
managing a now defunct improv theater and Cards on the Table.

(03:21):
I was fired from the Globe not six months later
for refusing to take down a tweet about com I
don't know you're only twenty two months I'm getting distracted.
Early twenty fifteen, I did get to do some original
reporting here and there, but my main gig was sourcing
viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that sites

(03:41):
like these would adorably and deceptively call hat tips. And
I'd love to tell you what more of these stories were,
but as any journalist who started working in the age
of the Internet knows, almost none of it is available
now without the assistance of the Internet archive. BDC wire
is gone, along with those articles I wrote, like ten

(04:02):
reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the one reason
not to end at all, or whatever I was reading
on today's Internet. BBC Wire never existed, so just a
reminder you are listening to a future piece of lost media.
But in the mid twenty tens, a lot of writers
got their start the same way I did. At this time,

(04:23):
including probably writers you like now, from young Gen xers
to elderly zoomers. We were tasked with regurgitating stories that
social media cared about, and regurgitating them to make them
seem like actual news. We weren't making shit up like tabloids,
but there was a sense that one writer was vomiting
into another writer's mouth, and so on and so on

(04:45):
to maximize site traffic and profit. We the writers never
got paid equitably, but for places like The Boston Globe
and other major news organizations who were hemorrhaging money due
to the inability to adapt to the Internet. When the
moment came, these click sister sites became a temporary attempt
at increasing cash flow, or, as I knew it, tricking

(05:07):
a group of twenty two year olds into thinking they
were real writers in exchange for bad pay and a
content mill mentality. So basically, I was working for a
regional ripoff of early BuzzFeed. And to be clear, I
am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with BuzzFeed News, which
is a Pulitzer winning and recently tragically shuttered news division.

(05:29):
Nor am I saying that working at a BuzzFeed content
mill was bad or even uncreative. I mean I think
that my BBC wire magnum opus. I saw Shrek the
Musical five times colon. This is my story fucking ripped,
not that you can read it anywhere. What's interesting is
that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed combing the

(05:53):
Internet to fill their website full of clickable, eccentric hashtag content,
often legitimized Internet characters of the day as legitimate news figures,
and this was never more true than in the mid
twenty tents. A quick brief on BuzzFeed. At this time,
the company had been around since two thousand and six,

(06:14):
and its legitimate news arm, BuzzFeed News, wouldn't be launched
until a year later in twenty sixteen. Founder Jonah Peretti
had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from the start. In
a twenty thirteen profile of Paretti in New York Magazine,
early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's quote algorithm to cold
stories from around the web that were showing stirring the virality.

(06:37):
In return for functioning as a sort of early warning system,
BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites to install programming code that allowed
the company to monitor their traffic. Like a lot of
social media we discussed today, Peretti's original project begun while
he was working at the similarly click minded Huffington Post

(06:57):
was collecting a shitload of data at best. He wanted
to know what people were interested in. If I'm being cynical,
he wanted to sell it back to us in it
easy to consume package, and we were happy to do it.
By twenty fifteen, BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating
original content in addition to their bread and Butter, which

(07:19):
was both curating and rephrasing viral stories from other corners
of the Internet to drive traffic. And one thousand different
quizzes on which ice cream flavor you were based on
your mental illness diagnosis something like that. I took them all,
no judgment, min chocolate, chip, OCD, bipolar whatever. Much of
early BuzzFeed was extremely goofy and what I think is

(07:41):
now sort of associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing,
but there was no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brunson
produced a lot of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed,
and many people in their writing and performance stable ended
up bailing on BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill
workers and not artists. Think comedians and writers like Gabe

(08:03):
Dunn and Alison Raskin. Think super successful YouTubers like Sophia
and Niguard. Think whether you love them or you hate
them for cheating on their wives, the try guys. But
regardless of the level of talent, there's no point in
denying it. A lot of early BuzzFeed was rehash stuff
either sent in by users or gently lifted by a

(08:24):
fleet of young, aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a
sticky story that someone else had posted online for free already.
The goal show it to a wider audience with some
light commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed.
And one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character co signs in

(08:44):
its history came on February twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, a
day that launched two huge viral stories. One was about
a pair of lamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
In Sun City. Today this may have been the very
definition of the Wild West, a slow, sometimes high speed
pursuit of two lamas on the loose, breaking away from
their owners, at times from each other, seizing their moment,
and they're shot at freedom.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
And the other one is one whose impact is still
almost bafflingly still enduring today. The dress. Your sixteenth minute
starts now. The dress. It's a potent and memorable piece

(10:13):
of Internet lore. One where your perception mattered was this dress,
which was first posted by a Scottish mother of the bride,
Cecilia Bleesdale in this weird blown out photo from a
designer outlet in England. Was this dress blue and black?
Or was it white and gold? It was blue and black,
and I knew that right away because I'm perfect and

(10:35):
I've never made a mistake. And even though it sounds
old timey, I mean, after all, we're talking about an
optical illusion that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera.
It's kind of hard to overstate what a sensation the
dress became. I remember this day so clearly because this
story broke my second week working as a professional writer
and as a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait.

(10:57):
It was like a gorgeous gift, had to say and
did from space. As I was reflecting, I wanted to
make sure I wasn't fluffing the memory in my mind,
so I reached out to my buddy, Kevin Slain, who
was one of the other three writers working overtime to
create hashtag content on BDC wire to be read by
hashtag nobody for hashtag seventy hours a week, and he

(11:18):
remembered this day really clearly too.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
My name is Kevin Slain, and I am a staff
writer at the Boston Globe, covering entertainment and culture.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Hi, Kevin, what's up?

Speaker 4 (11:33):
Not much, Jamie? How are you?

Speaker 2 (11:35):
I am good after all these years, I'm good.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
Real throw it back talking to you today about this day.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
I know about this historic day that is over nine
years ago now, which feels not great. Okay. So I
just wanted to go because I feel like I was
writing out like how I imagine this day. I think
it was like, certainly in my first month working at
bad Wire, do you remember the dress day in our

(12:04):
little corner?

Speaker 4 (12:06):
So I remember what I did that day, and at
least in my case, we're talking about Thursday, which was
kind of like the dress dropped at night, you know.
It was the wave the day went for me was
I was at work. I wrote a story about the Lamas,
which was the big I remember, a predecessor to the dress.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
I dreamed some Lamas. I can't find it on the
way back machine, but remember I was like, okay, okay,
Lama's first Lamas are the story.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
I had to go back through my Twitter archive and
I found that I tweeted out the story that I
wrote about the Lamas.

Speaker 5 (12:44):
Thank god.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
It was just, you know, our house style at the time,
lots of gifts, lots of old text, you know, us
trying to be BuzzFeed. I guess, yeah. But anyway, so
I did that, and then a bunch of us went
to have the hour at the Banshee, which was just
where a lot of us went after work, and I

(13:04):
proceeded to get really drunk and sing a lot of karaoke,
and at some point someone pulled out their phone and
started showing it to everyone, being like, check this out.
This dress thing is crazy. And I reacted to it
the way that I think I did to a lot
of that stuff for the time, because this was like
our first media job, and I just felt simultaneously like

(13:28):
enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed, and I felt,
you know, probably undeservedly above it all. And so the
thing was that back then they really had like a
flat hierarchy in terms of like who could say what,
and everyone would just send all staff emails all the time.
And I remember pulling out my phone and looking and

(13:52):
seeing that our old homepage had like three stories on
the dress right on the top, and there was like
an active email chain going on about this, and me,
very drunk.

Speaker 6 (14:03):
Just was like, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 4 (14:05):
I can't believe we have three stories on the dress
on the homepage. And whoever did that got like, you know,
offended that I said that rightfully.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
So well, I mean that's a lot. I didn't remember
there being three stories, but that also makes sense because
there were like three different verticals sort of all like
going to the same place, and we were all trying
to get clicks on the same thing that we were
all sort of ripping off for a BuzzFeed. It was
just like weird. It was a weird.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
Time, It really was. And I even went and then
looked at the like the next day I looked in
the wayback machine and it was even more of that.
It was like the night producer who wrote like a
short little thing, and then our old boss who I
won't name, wrote this like very ridiculous in his own
voice style post, and then someone else wrote like their

(14:54):
take on the dress, and then another of our old
bosses then asked John Henry to wear about the dress.
And there's a video I can't find of him talking
about the dress, which I wish I could find because
I think that's what I.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Wish we had. The John Henry funage that's.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
Unanged, right, like, who needed that?

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Well, thank you, thank you for reminiscing with me. This
was beautiful.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
Yes, it's weird to think about now, and I know
it's objectively not true. It was a totally different time
and you can't help but look back at it fondly,
despite the fact that I was hating myself through the
entire portion of it.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Thanks so much to Kevin, who is a real writer
for the Boston Globe and has been for years. So
this day was genuinely a huge day for news on
and about the Internet. The FCC had just voted to

(15:54):
classify Internet service providers as public utilities, effectively creating net neutrality,
but the dress was indisputably the main character. Here's the
cliff notes of what happened. In February twenty fifteen. A
Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding and the bride's
mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she
was considering wearing. The dress. It's not a great picture,

(16:17):
but it is a very mid twenty ten's mother of
the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some
color blocking unnecessary lace elements, but the color that was
the question the bride. Grace posted the photo of the
dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom
assured her that the dress was blue with black lace,
that Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace.

(16:40):
So she posted the question to her Facebook so her
friends could weigh in, and a week long debate was sparked.
So the dress first became a main character in her
small community in colin Say, Scotland. Then the wedding happened
and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic
of discussion at the wedding too, and it's actually members
of the wedding band that take the dress from a

(17:01):
local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlyn McNeil,
who was a close friend of the couples, said of
the dress, iurl we forgot about it until we saw
it at the wedding, which the mother of the bride
was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black in
any other timeline. This would be a footnote that Grace's
mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill

(17:21):
a decade later. But this was a time on the
Internet where viral stories were social currency. And Katelyn McNeil
had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was
her who ended up posting what would become the viral
seed that would take this story global on her tumbler.
The post, attached to a picture of the dress said, guys,
please help me. Is this dress white or gold? Or

(17:43):
blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and
we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this.
It got about five thousand notes, and if you aren't
Tumblr literate, that was a lot of interaction on the
platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in,
as the legend goes. BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running
the BuzzFeed tumbler at that time and was tasked with

(18:05):
what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular
garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Theft.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Caitlyn McNeil was writing so high on the dress fumes
that she sent Holderness her post saying, BuzzFeed, please help.
I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last
post on my tumbler. Okay, and some people see it
blue and some people see it white. Can you explain?
Because we are going crazy Holderness replied, Holy crap, it's
blue and black. I don't understand. I made a pole,

(18:35):
and she links to what she posted off of Caitlyn
McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening.
As Kevin correctly recalled, the post was simply titled what
color is this dress? There was a poll to vote
black and blue or white and gold. The post started
doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed

(18:56):
at that time did. It was after folks left for
work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an
overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning,
Holderness's post had reached eight hundred and forty thousand views
per minute. At its peak, it had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record,
becoming its most successful post of all time, and once

(19:19):
the BuzzFeed post took off, the dress became a popular
subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at
the time. But Twitter tends to be the thing that
people still talk about these days. Facebook is for moms
and creepy cousins, but in twenty fifteen, it was Twitter
where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in
like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right

(19:42):
before celebrities all realized in Unison that they needed their
own social media managers, and so you could be pretty
sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying.

Speaker 7 (19:52):
And for everyone asking, I see blue and.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Black, And it was the real Taylor Swift when she said.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
I don't understand this odd dress debit, and I feel
like it's a trick somehow, I'm confused and scared.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
Ps it's obviously blue and black, or Mindy kaaling with
one of the most twenty fifteen tweets of all time,
the dress is worse than the Sony hack to me,
Beyonce said nothing, This is all a little pedestrian for Beyonce,
BuzzFeed was at the top of their game, and so
of course made more content about the dress. Twenty four
hours after the first post about the dress went live

(20:26):
on the site, nine out of ten trending BuzzFeed posts
were about the same dress. They were fucking relentless. Why
are people seeing different colors in that damn dress? The
dress is blue and black, says the person who saw
it in person. This second photo of the dress definitely
proves that the dress is blue and black. What the
dress color you see says about you? And the one

(20:48):
post that wasn't about the dress. Here's the first picture
of Eddie Redmain as transgender painter Lily elba Oh twenty fifteen.
And don't forget at this time, buzzfeeds video vertical was
also really popular on YouTube, and that was also going
nuts with traffic from the dress.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
You are seeing white and gold?

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Where are you looking at? Oh no, you're kidding.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
You heard correctly, that's Quinta Brunson. I just think that's
really funny. So yes, the dress is a goofy sensation,
and it even trickles down to lowly worm regional BuzzFeed
ripoff writer Jamie Loftus. But keep in mind BuzzFeed is
a business, and people with any monetary stock in BuzzFeed
were doing donuts in their Mercedes about this fucking story.

(21:35):
There was even this bizarre essay by then editor in
chief Ben Smith saying that the dress phenomenon was this
sign of BuzzFeed's power.

Speaker 7 (21:44):
He said, the explosion of Kate's holderness is post about
the dress White and Gold, by the way, is a
reminder that while we now do so many more things
We've never moved away from our roots. Indeed, we launched
the Cute or Not app yesterday.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Sir, Sure, your underpaid employee reblogged a Tumbler post, but
by all means, keep talking. This post in particular is
so weird to reflect on now. It sounds so certain
that BuzzFeed will be the vanguard of what makes something
special on the Internet, and that a post like the
dress is all a part of the game of five
D chess that BuzzFeed is playing, and that they're the

(22:20):
reason that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested
most of all in what a story does, not just
in how many people read it, but in what effect
it has on their lives and on the world. Kate's
post delighted people and connected them to steal an idea
from z Frank. Its power was less in the encapsulated
item itself than in the network around it. That's true

(22:42):
of a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a
recipe or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions
and millions of impressions from this story, one that Kaitlyn
McNeil literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps
the profits from the engagement. At a time where impressions
were what find your success and your advertising profits, as

(23:03):
is so common in these stories, it was like everyone
was benefiting from the dress story, except, of course, anyone
involved in the actual story. It didn't take long for
completely unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress. To
capitalize on the trend. Pizza Hut posts a picture of
a shitty pizza with the caption It's white and gold.
Two newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit

(23:25):
The original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells
out immediately. Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of social media
monitoring site crowd Tangled, said this when asked about the
range of institutions that wanted in on this story. This
is from a twenty sixteen retrospective on the Day of
the Lama and the Dress from twenty sixteen, written for

(23:48):
where Else BuzzFeed.

Speaker 6 (23:50):
Silverman says this, We've seen other stories go viral, but
the sheer diversity of outlets that picks it up and
we're talking about it was unlike anything we had ever seen.
Everyone from QVC to Warner Bros. To local public libraries
to Red Cross affiliates were all posting links to it
on their social accounts. That kind of diversity and who's
sharing a story pretty much never happens, and certainly never

(24:12):
to that degree.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
And of course, no Internet main character would be complete
without the backlash, which in the case of the dress
came in the form of people bemoaning that this story
had overshadowed more important news from the same day. And
even this mentality feels a little bit dated now. Yes,
it's important to discuss the other news of the day,
but favoring something goofy and meaningless over hard news wasn't

(24:36):
something that started in twenty fifteen. Although that said, I
do think there's a case for saying that the success
of posts like the dress tells people in tech developing
social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories
are distracting for people, leading to an era of the
algorithm favoring engagement driven posts over carefully reported news. To

(24:57):
talk about what made the dress special in terms of
what it is said about where social media was picking
its main characters at this time, I turned to a
writer who has spent her career writing about the Internet,
often meaning the Internet turns on her. Taylor Lowrenz released
her book Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence,
and Power on the Internet last year, taking a look

(25:17):
at the short and eventful history of online influencers, including
a fair number of characters of the day, and yes,
the dress herself. We caught up on zoom about this
very particular moment in internet history.

Speaker 5 (25:31):
I'm Taylor Lorenz and I'm the author of Extremely Online,
The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
This has been your beat for some time. How did
you become the person to talk to about the Internet.

Speaker 5 (25:44):
Yeah, well, I'm like peak millennial. I graduated directly into
the recession, the two thousand and eight financial crisis, and
I had had like random internships in college and summer jobs,
but I didn't really know what I was doing. And
so I was working retail foodstarre, I worked for a
messenger company, I was babysitting. I worked at a call

(26:04):
center for a while. I was just kind of making
money and I discovered Tumblr, which back in two thousand
and nine was ascended as a social platform, and that
was kind of my gateway into blogging. And I just
started blogging about stuff. At the time, I was really
against the mainstream media because they were writing really stupid

(26:24):
things about tech and millennials and it was making me mad,
and so I would just go on my blogs and
rants about whatever I felt like ranting about. I was
really inspired by this woman Katie Natopoulos, who yes, she
was blogging back then too, and she had this website.
She had all these funny like blogs and sites, and

(26:45):
she seemed to be like the only person that I thought.
She was like a couple years older than me and
seemed really cool, And I just thought, I'm going to
try to write about the Internet, but like from the
perspective of somebody that actually uses it.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
There are stories that feel or my feeling at first
was it feels very connected to a certain type of
platform or like a certain era in social media. When
I was reading extremely Online, I was like, oh, right,
the dress was kind of this cross platform success story.

(27:18):
Could you unpact that a little for me of like
how the original story and then BuzzFeed kind of had
a mutual role in this story success. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (27:28):
We was just to kind of like explain the landscape
throughout the early to mid twenty tens. You had this
explosion of digital media sites spurred by VC funding, you know, BuzzFeed,
Mike dot Com, Race to Work, Mashable, like, there were
all these like digital media sites, and the primary way
that they were gaining traffic was going into sort of

(27:49):
what were then the depths of the Internet, mostly Tumblr
and Reddit, getting the most viral content off those platforms
and repackaging on the website. Because that was an era
when not a lot of people were going and spending
a lot of time and getting their news and information
and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't as
widely adopted. People didn't know how to navigate the Internet yet,

(28:10):
so buzzeed would just sort of like mine this content.
Keats was working at BuzzFeed at the time, found a
Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow, this
is kind of crazy. It was getting a little bit
of traction on Tumblr, and she thought, let me post
it on the BuzzFeed website because that's kind of again
the business model at the time was finding what did
while on Tumblr and then bringing it to this wider

(28:31):
audience a BuzzFeed, And of course she publishes it on
BuzzFeed and it just goes insane. A bunch of other
places immediately published their own versions of that story, but
BuzzFeed got like all the upside kind of from it,
Like they got all the traffic they were able to
monetize through ads on that article page. Like right, nobody

(28:52):
was clicking through as much to the original tumbler.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
That day, I was cruising the way back machine and
I was like, this is what I think of as
like peak BuzzFeed. How did they get there? Like what
made BuzzFeed special or early to this kind of content mining?

Speaker 5 (29:12):
BuzzFeed was one of the first true sort of like
digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea
in the two thousands, it's really expurred by the rise
of blogging, that you could build digital media platforms and
capture digital media ad dollars. There's all this money moving
from traditional advertising to digital advertising. The traditional advertising had

(29:35):
been with newspapers and traditional media, and so the thinking
was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are
going to go to the digital version of the news
media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was
this website like vox and you know, other sites were
sort of created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that

(29:56):
didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook
and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of
digital media companies died pretty much or like as a
shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing.
Traffic was so important because the more views you got,
the more digital display ads you know we're seeing, the
more money the platform would make. And this is when

(30:17):
a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts.
They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot
of multimedia because the Internet speeds weren't there yet, so
it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load.
Instagram was barely had video at that time, so links
were really kaying and if you could create a very
shareable link, you could get tons of traffic. Therefore, the

(30:38):
company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just
expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that Internet
users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit.
You have to remember this was pre algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic
seeds were not really a thing back then. I think
Twitter only rolled out their algorithmicfeed in twenty sixteen. Twenty fifteen,
it was really like the Internet was very manual, and

(31:01):
so if people went on a platform, they couldn't especially
Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological, right, so
if you went on the platform, it was hard to
kind of find the most interesting viral content. So we
relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into these
platforms scrape out the most engaging content and presented to

(31:21):
you all in one place. On this case too, I
think it's really interesting that the dress post it was
posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan tumbler
for this girl, Sarah White chol I was mispronounce her
name even though Yeah lovely who was like a YouTuber manager.
So it was just like the chances of somebody finding
that normally, yes, it was getting reblogged on Tumblr, but

(31:43):
BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Basically, thanks so much to Taylor and check out Extremely
Online in stores now, and we'll be right back with
another interview about why the success of the dress marked
the beginning of the end for dumb fun on the Internet.

(32:09):
Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I am The author of
the twenty fifteen post was SNL's isis sketch too offensive.
As fascinated as I am about how the dress went
viral in what now feels like an almost old fashioned way,
I wanted to take a second to do my due diligence.
Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes.

(32:30):
This was a major subject of clickbait from Clickbait at
the time, most notably a Wired piece published the day
after that ended up racking up over thirty two million views.
In that piece, writer Adam Rodgers asked Professor Bevill Conway,
who studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment,
and Professor Conway said that it was some combination of

(32:51):
the varying ways in which people perceive light, and that
the picture was just shitty quality and really blown out.
Here's his fancy science explanation. Your visual system is looking
at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic
bias of the daylight axis. People either discount the blue side,
in which case they end up seeing white and gold,
or discount the gold side, in which case they end

(33:14):
up with blue and black. This also connects to the
maddening feeling of the dress switching colors before your eyes.
Like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFeed video. So if
you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and
I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich
scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue
to the dress with some pretty interesting findings. They spoke

(33:38):
to fourteen hundred respondents, with fifty seven percent seeing black
and blue, eleven percent black and brown, thirty percent white
and gold, and two percent. Other tests included showing the
dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see if
that's shifted bias, and a study from Pascal Wallash showed
the really interesting trend that people who woke up early

(33:58):
were more likely to see the dress as white and gold,
and people who went out at night moore were likely
to see black and blue. And I'll admit reading about
why your brain makes you see the dress as one
thing or the other is really really interesting, even when
what's being explained to you is a pretty straightforward optical illusion.
And even though as I'm writing this episode this only

(34:19):
happened about nine years ago, it feels like it's longer.
It reminds me of a targeted ad I got for
a T shirt sold by ClickHole which if you're not familiar,
is a spinoff of the onion Net, specifically satirized clickbait.
The shirt says the Internet nineteen eighty three to twenty fourteen,
and it gets at this feeling I'm having that shortly

(34:40):
after the Dress, the Internet became less fun. Of course,
this is coming from a very Western, privileged perspective, but
it's pretty commonly held that in the US, around the
time that the twenty sixteen election cycle began, social media
became less fun. Let's not to say it was a
cakewalk before. There are many stories of discription and harassment

(35:01):
that took place here, many of which I'll cover on
this show. But I'm trying to get at the ratio
of fun stories to existentially terrifying stories, the ratio of hey,
what color is this? To bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream.
The dress kind of feels like the end of an era.
Early twenty fifteen wasn't an Internet that wasn't poisoned with hate,

(35:24):
but it felt like an Internet whose hate didn't poison everything,
and less than a year later that didn't really feel true.
I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress
story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to
better understand how the Internet shifted in the year after
the dress, to bring us to the kind of viral
stories we were seeing in twenty sixteen. Just a year later.

(35:46):
For Perspective, the Ringers roundup of twenty sixteen viral stories
included some classics like chewbacco mom, but also just the
word Nazism. So, yeah, there was a mainstream shift that
had taken place. And this was for a reason, not
just because of the heightened bigoted extremism in the Western world,
but because of how our social networks were functioning. It's

(36:08):
something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as recently
as twenty nineteen, less than five years after the dress story.
In November twenty nineteen, he told Max Read at Intelligencer,
the dress.

Speaker 7 (36:20):
Was a kind of perfect thing to catch fire. At
that moment, the Internet was less polarized and politicized, and
it had shifted to mobile fully, so people were looking
at mobile devices with the dress. If you saw it
on your phone and you were with people, you could
hold the phone up and say what color is this. Plus,
in the early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die
in the evening because people would watch television or go

(36:42):
out with their friends. Now, with mobile, we see primetime
for our content as the same as primetime for television.
People are sharing content and looking at content later.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Keep in mind this is a quote from less than
half a decade later, but the difference between twenty fifteen
and twenty nineteen on the US Internet made it feel
like he was talking about twenty years ago. I mean,
hell on the Internet. Forty years passed between November twenty
nineteen and November twenty twenty, and since this interview, BuzzFeed
has changed even more. Paretti pulled the plug on his

(37:16):
Pulitzer winning news operation only seven years after it launched
in twenty twenty three, and is currently focused on rerouting
BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing, yes, but not surprising, because after all,
Paretti started the company to operate on algorithms with no
creative at all, and now he has robots instead of

(37:37):
writers and the company is worth less than ever. I
talked to a second author who published a great book
about social media and full disclosure. He's also my best
friend's boyfriend. He's the best and pertinent to you. He
has a thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have
been forcibly evolved and monetized to serve those that make
them money, not their users. Max Fisher currently co hosts

(38:00):
Offline on Crooked Media and wrote about this very topic
in twenty twenty two's The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story
of how Social Media Rewired our minds and our world.
Here are some of our talk.

Speaker 8 (38:13):
My name is Max Fischer and I'm a journalist and podcaster.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
As we're talking about the dress today is what is
your personal recollection of the dress saga? Were you You
were working in media at the time.

Speaker 8 (38:25):
Right, I not only was a working in media, but
I was working not at BuzzFeed, but at Fox dot com,
which was a fellow kind of web you know, new journalism,
left leaning startup that was trying to chase audience on
social media. So it felt very much kind of in
our wheelhouse. It was something that we were all really

(38:47):
excited about. Wow, look a post can get this much
attention by you know, doing something that Facebook really likes
and that social media algorithms really like. And we were
trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were
trying to do like, you know, the policy WONK version
of the dress every day, So we thought it was
like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of
attention to.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
So I know that you've spent a lot of recent
years thinking about how our algorithms work, and you know
the implications of that. Were you thinking about this ten
years ago? What did that algorithm chasing look like?

Speaker 8 (39:23):
I was thinking about it, But like a lot of
journalists I think of our generation, I thought of it
as just purely a good thing, as just a thing
where it's like, oh, if I write my piece that
I was going to write anyway on you know, the
Iran nuclear deal, but I phrased the headline in a
certain way, then Facebook can deliver me, thanks to its algorithm,

(39:43):
huge amounts of traffic and eyeballs and people who want
to read the story. And that's great, and that's so
nice that social media can be there to help us
reach a larger audience. So I was aware of it,
but thought of it as kind of a relatively neutral force, like, sure,
you play up certain emotions in your headlines and certain
ideas that you know are likelier to go viral. But again,

(40:06):
maybe like a lot of people, it wasn't really until
after Trump was elected, like a year and a half
after that that I started to think of social media
and social media algorithms as something that could be bad.
At this point, I really thought that they were just
a good thing and.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Also just I think, certainly on my end, there was
a lack of thinking about how this algorithm chasing translated
to money, which in retrospect feels very naive of me,
but there was at the time. It seems like money
to be had from you know, taking these stories that

(40:41):
you would find on social media and then you know,
delivering them and making you know, question mark a shitload of.

Speaker 8 (40:49):
Money, right, I mean, the idea for the web startups
of that era was that you will get so many
more eyeballs on social media, and then so many more
people will click through to your website and they will
see ads on your website, so then you will make
more money. And we weren't thinking of it, and maybe
you guys were breaking it in to the Boston BuzzFeed.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
But almost impossible to can see that we were.

Speaker 8 (41:16):
I mean, we maybe this was idealistic, but we were
thinking of it as this will be great because it
will make journalism sustainable, Like we were all veterans of
the two thousand and eight financial crisis, So we had
all lived through a time when there were no jobs
to be had because the industry was collapsing because the
Internet and social media had taken all of the revenue
that used to go through classifieds. So the idea that, aha,

(41:38):
now we're going to leverage that same social media to
get all these ad impressions. We can have a sustainable
business again, and won't that be so great for like
the future of the industry. And like before I worked
at Fox, I worked at the Washington Post, and they
loved the idea that you would do the journalism you
were going to do anyway, but right in a way
that will please algorithms, or right the headline in a
way that will please algorithms, so that we can make

(42:00):
more money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So
it is a very starry eyed era that boy has
sure not aged well.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Used a phrase that it just feels very inherent to
what the dress was. You use a phrase the old algorithm.
What do you mean when you say the old algorithm?

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Oh?

Speaker 8 (42:20):
Yeah, okay, So I think we all know that algorithms
are what drive everything and how you experience social media.
They're the programs on every platform that select what you
see the order you see it in, that choose what
kind of emotions to surface, what kind of like political

(42:41):
valance to surface for you. They're the absolute core of
the social media business model. The era before algorithms, social
media was a loser business that didn't make any money,
and people didn't spend that much time on like rimbor MySpace,
you didn't spend that much time on the site live journal.
After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on
site explode because they are so effective at making the

(43:05):
experience of being social media very engaging and addictive, and
that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So
for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked
from their first invention and like the end of the
two thousands, like Facebook kind of starts it in two
thousand and six with the Facebook news Feed, but it
takes a while for their platforms to catch up up

(43:26):
through like the era of the dress, the way that
it worked, the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever
content was. They tend to promote outbound links, like it
would promote a link to some other website or news site,
even if it's like a lollcat or something off the platform,

(43:47):
and it would be whatever is the link that people
would click on the most. And what that tended to
privilege is if you remember like upworthy, Upworthy was like
a website that existed to create content specifically decater to
like the old Facebook algorithm, because it was like curiosity
gaps or it was like you won't believe what happened next.

(44:08):
So you're like, oh, I guess I'll click on that link,
and then you click on that link, and then Facebook
or Twitter learns, okay, we promote that link to a
lot of people, they will click on it. And the
dress is kind of the last gasp of that old
algorithm because it is again you see the link and
the way that it displayed on not just Facebook, although
Facebook was the big one at the time, but all

(44:29):
of the platforms read it. Twitter, the way that it
would displays you would see a cutoff image of the
dress and then you would see a headline about people
see it in different colors, so it really makes you
want to click. So everybody who saw this link on
their news feed, you were like, oh, I have to
click through and figure out what color the dress is.
Even if you only spend eight seconds on that post,

(44:50):
the algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the
platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is
when BuzzFeed starts to get you know, a million people
minute or whatever the numbers were.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Looking at it, a section of your book covers really thoroughly.
Like twenty fifteen is a really important year for this shift.
So the way that the algorithm looks in late February
twenty fifteen and at the end of the year seems
pretty different. What is changing with how algorithms are used
on social media throughout this era.

Speaker 8 (45:23):
So there's not like a moment of shift, like they
don't pull a big lever and go over to new
set of algorithms. But bummer bummer, I know. But over
like twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, the big social media
platforms make a bunch of incremental changes that shift to
a set of algorithms that just fundamentally privilege a different

(45:44):
set of things. The language that Facebook uses for this
and they are kind of like leading the charge at
this point because they're still dominant way back in this era,
is that they want to start privileging quote emotionally engaging interactions.
And what that means is that instead of pushing up
to the top of your feed, whatever is the link

(46:04):
to an outbound website that they think you were likely
is to click on, they want to promote whatever content
in your feed, whether that's a link, or it's a discussion,
or it's a Facebook group or it's a photo that
is going to generate the most discussion on that post.
And the reason they do that is they want to
keep you on the platforms because if you click that
outbound link, now you're on BuzzFeed, and Facebook doesn't make

(46:26):
any money from you spending time on BuzzFeed. They want
you to spend as much time on Facebook in discussions
whatever as they can. And they frame this is like, oh,
we're going to start giving you. They call it like
meaningful connections or like meaningful interactions, as if it's going
to bring you like all sorts of love and friendship.
But of course that is not at all what it brings,
because these algorithms are incredibly ruthless in running billions of

(46:53):
what are basically tests like little social science experiments every
single day. And what is the exact kind of content
that will get people to engage in these quote unquote
emotionally engaging interactions, not just to spend time on the site,
but also to post back in the site in ways
that we'll get other people to spend time on the site.
And like, what is the content and the set of

(47:15):
emotions that are going to be most engaging. And like,
you know, as any student of human nature will know,
it's not the nice stuff. It's not you know, here's
your friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new
job promotion, your aunt had a great day. It's outrage primarily,
and especially moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear

(47:39):
or hatred or discussed with some sort of social outgroup.
And that might be you know, political partisans on the
other side that for a lot of people, that's racial groups,
religious groups, immigrants, anything that cultivates a sense of like
there is a social group out there that I don't
like and I find them to be scary or I

(47:59):
find them to be offensive, and I want to rally
my in group against them. That is the thing that
the algorithms as they are being introduced to all of
these platforms over twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen learned to
surface above all else. And Facebook's own researchers are tracking
all of this, and they're finding both that this is

(48:20):
enormously successful at making people spend more time on the website,
but also that it's really bad for them. There's this
paper that's kind of the last gasp of when Facebook
used to publish research into what their algorithm does with users.
In May twenty fifteen, Facebook's researchers, because they have accessed
all this data, published this paper warning that this change

(48:43):
to this new algorithm was sorting people into not just
like minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing
whatever was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme
viewpoint that everybody agreed with, and that that created an
effect that was associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over

(49:03):
time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a
somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme
in whatever beliefs they already held, and that they became
likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies, because, of course, if
you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it

(49:23):
will make you feel even angrier.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Right, I was fascinated to read how that information was
at one point public, and I think, like how it
feels completely inconceivable that they would publish anything like that
to the public just five years later or even two
years later. And how you know it was? It was
well known internally and it seems like I mean you

(49:48):
explained I think inside and also outside of Facebook, the
sort of attempted, the attempts to blow the whistle on like, hey,
this is really not good for us. So I mean,
it's of course like profit is why that happens. But
I at what point do these platforms sort of switch

(50:10):
to infinite growth?

Speaker 8 (50:13):
So that had always been the business model since those
first days of the news feed back on the late
two thousands. But what happens actually around the same time,
around twenty fourteen, is they start to realize that the
pool of human attention is finite, and that's what they

(50:33):
trade in. That's their asset that they are chasing, is
seconds of your day that you're spending on the platform
so they can sell ads against it. And they realize
around twenty fourteen that they've kind of reached saturation collectively
on how much of that they hold where at this
point people spend As of twenty fourteen, people on average
are spending more time on social media platforms than they

(50:55):
do interacting with other people socially in real life, which
is staggering, and that gap, of course has only grown since.
So what they realize when they get to this point
where they realize, Okay, we've kind of saturated the market
for how much human attention we can captures, they get
into this arms race with each other for who can

(51:16):
hold more of that attention. And that is when they
go from just having a existing business model of infinite
growth to needing to, like you said, take every step
that they can, no matter how extreme, to try to
outcompete each other for how much of that attention they hold.
And this is when all of the social media companies

(51:37):
again is around like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, higher up,
all of the big names and artificial intelligence, like every
major European and American researcher at every big research university
suddenly works at Facebook, which is like that seems unsurprising
now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at that
time that was really shocking because this is just like

(51:58):
this was like fancy or MySpace. It's just like a
weird little website, and all of a sudden, all of
these rock stars of artificial intelligence work for them, because
what they are doing is they are trying to make
the social media algorithms that govern what you see as
smart and as ruthless as possible. This is when YouTube

(52:18):
sets towards this big internal goal they have for one
billion hours of daily watch time, meaning that everyone who
uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours of video
every single day, which is ten times what they had
across the platform at the time they set this goal.
So they're starting to really design their business models and

(52:40):
their engineering around the idea that they need to in
order to survive drastically increase the stickiness and addictiveness of
being on their platform, which is when they kind of
start getting into all of these dark arts of emotional
and psychological manipulation.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
It feels so clear now and at the time you're like,
this is weird. Why am I so upset?

Speaker 8 (53:02):
On Well, the thing that I always think about that
I did not appreciate at the time. I didn't get
its significance. But looking back, I'm like, oh, okay, I
see how that was like a big watership moment is
around twenty fifteen, when gamer Gate goes from being this
thing that is happening on the like fringes of Reddit

(53:24):
and the fringes of YouTube, where it's like a bunch
of like young white guys are really mad about video
games for some reason and I don't understand why, to
all of a sudden it's completely dominant on all of
the social platforms, and it's the like number one thing
day after day on the platforms, and all of these
like weirdo gamer Gate characters like Miloguianapolis and Mike Cernovich,

(53:46):
all of a sudden they're like mainstream political figures. And
that is we know now in retrospect because this is
the time when social media algorithm started to realize that
stuff like gamer Gate was going to be so so
effective at increasing engagement. So that's where when you go
away from the social media algorithms of the era of

(54:07):
like the dress, what you get instead of the social
media algorithms of game or Gate, which I would not
consider a trade up.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
This is also the time where which I feel like
ties right into the Milo stuff, where Breitbart really starts
to pop off, and it feels to me, I mean
very diabolical match of the BuzzFeed model of like luring
people in with really splashy headlines. As we're like coming

(54:35):
out of this era of the dress and things are
getting more politicized and engagement driven to you know, really
monetize and push outrage. What are the success stories and
how do they sort of shape what the new algorithm favors.

Speaker 8 (54:51):
That's a great way to put it. I think you're
exactly right that if BuzzFeed and like upworthy worthy sites
that embodied benefited from the kind of pre twenty fifteen
social media ecosystem and algorithms, then the site that embodies
and most benefited from the post twenty fifteen social media
algorithms is definitely Breitbart. There was this huge Harvard study

(55:17):
or it was like led through Harvard, but it was
a ton of different scholars that came out after the
twenty sixteen election and was kind of trying to ask, like, Okay,
what happened, what was the like something the internet played
some role in the twenty sixteen election. Social media played
some role, but we're not quite sure what it is.
So let's do like a big systemic investigation into what

(55:37):
the social web looked like in the run up to
the twenty sixteen election, And one of the big things
they found is that from May twenty fifteen to November
twenty sixteen, when the election was held, which is kind
of the onset of that era of the new social
media algorithms, Breitbart was the third most shared media outlet

(55:57):
on all of social media, which is crazy when you
know that Breitbart has like no staff, they have no budget.
It's a terrible experience to be on their website. They
don't produce very many articles, and before this algorithmic shift,
they had been a teeny tiny little website with no readership,
and there was like this kind of narrative that like, oh, yes,

(56:19):
Steve Bannon, who's running Breitbart, is some like genius of
the dark arts of the social web. And what we
learned from this Harvard study and from a lot of
subsequent investigations is that he was not. The people of
Breitbart were not these geniuses. They were just passive beneficiaries
of the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter, basically plucking this
website and similar websites out and pushing them in front

(56:41):
of huge audiences of people. Like Breitbart got more audience
and engagement on Facebook than Fox News did in the
run up to the election. And Fox News is like
a bajillion dollar company with hundreds of reporters.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
I mean, and certainly in the case of Breitbart, it
was just saying shit and presenting it as news, and
you know, like I wasn't saying fascistic shit, but there
were times where I was just kind of saying shit,
and they're like, and she's a reporter. I don't know,
it's interesting to reflect on.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
Yeah, that's a.

Speaker 8 (57:17):
Really interesting point. I hadn't thought about that before. But
you're right that this was kind of the first stage
and a shift that now feels much more complete, from
getting your news from a news source to then you're
getting your news from a new source repackaged for social media,
to then you're getting your news from a new source
that is saying shit. I know, most of us get

(57:38):
our news from people who are just saying shit on
social media, and we kind of like trust or hope
that the like viral posts that we're reading is at
some point sourced from something real, and sometimes it is
and it's just spun in a way to like get
more engagement on social media. But you know, it's just
as possible that it's made up, that it's exaggerated, or

(58:01):
that it's out of context. So it is, in retrospect
like the start of a larger shift to the just
saying shit era of media consumption, because on some level,
you know, even though we do all care about getting
accurate information from credible sources, our brains, unfortunately are really
really drawn to things that are emotionally satisfying, or that

(58:27):
delivered like outrage, which feels very affirming to indulge in,
or that deliver a sense of like moral righteousness, or
in group versus outgroup, and that can overpower that desire
that we do also feel for real credible information, which
is of course only gotten worse since twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
Thanks so much to Max for speaking with me in
full disclosure. His cat is so large now I have
to be honest. In the interest of contextualizing the dress
in real time, I did leave something off about its
longer future. To this day, there's an an entire page
about the dress on the Roman Original's website where it
was manufactured, calling it the quote phenomenon that revealed differences

(59:08):
in human color perception, which have been the subject of
ongoing scientific investigation in neuroscience and vision science. I mean sure.
And while some subjects on this show will require a
bonk on the head to fully remember who is Chilli neighbor,
who is being dad Sidebart, the mid character is so
often insert name of food, insert type of person, whatever,

(59:32):
but the dress rarely needs introduction if the person was
online at the time. There were retrospectives of the dress
story being written as recently as last year. When I'm
building out episodes for this show, step one is to
reach out to the main character themselves to see if
they want to talk. After all, the dress was for
someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated

(59:53):
at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she
was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage.
Cecilia and the married couple got the classic fifteen minutes
treatment for this era. The married couple, Grace and keirr
and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to
la to be on the Ellen Show, and the couple
got a briefcase full of ten thousand American dollars. The

(01:00:16):
mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason,
half black and blue and half white and gold, and
that was it, and Cecilia was pissed from a Guardian
piece from late twenty fifteen.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
Should it be on display somewhere? Blaisdelle wonders, should it
be in a vaulter or whatever. It still got sweaty
marks on though needs a clean. So nine years later
I wanted to see where everyone was, and that's where
this story takes an especially dark turn. When I went
to find out where that couple is now, I found
this headline from July twenty twenty three. Man behind viral

(01:00:50):
blue black dress illusion charged with trying to kill wife.
I don't want to rehash it too heavily here, but
the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the dress
and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated violent
attempts on Grace's life, isolating her from friends and family,

(01:01:11):
and attempting to murder her during the spring of twenty
twenty two. He then went to court and denied all
charges and most clickbait in twenty twenty three because yes,
all of the same outlets reported on this story again
made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously
been used in a domestic violence awareness campaign in South

(01:01:32):
Africa back in twenty fifteen, featuring a woman wearing the
dress in white and gold while covered in black and
blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see black
and blue? The ad asked.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
I think this ad is very weird, even if the
intention was well placed, and the wave of twenty twenty
three press connecting it to the real life terror campaign
taken out on Grace felt just as wrong because virtually
all of those pieces, while sympathetic to her, ended in
some tired version of by the way, the dress was

(01:02:04):
black and blue and as of this month, in May
twenty twenty four, I am recording this a month after
we finished this episode. Here, Johnston is being held in
prison after pleading guilty to attacking and attempting to kill
Grace back in twenty twenty two. At the time, Grace
called and texted people for help after years of reporting

(01:02:25):
abuse and said that her husband was trying to kill
her after she was violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened
with a knife. As of this recording, the case is
ongoing and we wish Grace nothing but peace. And getting
as far away from any of this fucking discourse as
she needs to do. And it's further proof that any

(01:02:46):
Internet story on a long enough timeline begins to reflect
the ugliness of the world that the Internet reflects and
so often warps. Okay, cutting back into the original episode here,
I'm sort of hesitant to say that there's it's a
clear lesson to be learned from the saga of the dress,
but it certainly encapsulates a moment in Internet history that

(01:03:07):
feels ungo backable, and there's no better example of that
than all the writers who were paid at the time
to make it mean something outside of being an increasingly
rare monocultural moment that swirled in normal people with tech
profits and our attention. So the dress means something, but
what exactly that is is a little elusive. Almost ten

(01:03:29):
years on, I feel kind of nostalgic for a time
where the Internet could unite over a neutral issue, But
as a twenty two year old clickbait writer, I didn't
even have the time to appreciate it because I needed
toform an edgy, smart adjacent opinion about it as quickly
as possible. Here's a passage from a reaction to the
dress and the lama's success as stories on the heels

(01:03:50):
of the net neutrality decision. The essay is called the
open Internet will keep Us stupid and happy. At this point,
it's unfathomable to think of anything short of a Gill
force windstorm full of knives that could prevent the Internet
from brimming with memes, jifts, and asenine materials from content farms. Hell,
I used to write for a content farm in Boston,

(01:04:12):
and yes, I have written an article called how Seth
MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West can
teach us about how to run our tech companies? And
that is objectively gross. The Internet is stupid, but it
was almost stupid and expensive. Thanks to the net neutrality
vote passed yesterday, we won't need to worry about our
access to lamas and confusing dresses being hindered for now. Anyway. Yeah,

(01:04:37):
I wrote this, and what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways?
Good for her, I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again.
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jamie Loftus,
our other executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans,
and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our

(01:05:00):
theme song is by Sadie Dupui, and I would like
to thank all of the pets, Anderson the dog, my
cats fleeing Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who'll outlive
us all. Bye,