June 4, 2024 • 54 mins
If a tree falls in the garden where a woman enjoys drinking coffee with her husband and no one’s there to hear it, should the Internet harass her anyway? In 2022, Daisey sent one innocuous tweet that launched a thousand takes.
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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 (00:04):
Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but
being a woman on the internet sucks.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It is bad.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is so bad that maybe you just rolled your
eyes at hearing me say it, like, well, a white
millennial just said being a woman online is actually really hard,
and not to be that brave white millennial. But yes,
it really sucks being a woman on the internet, and
it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl,
(00:31):
non binary, really just not a cis man online and
other random online users know that, particularly anonymous people, you'll
get a crash course in gender discrimination the likes of
which you could not imagine. And of course this happens
across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogynir to
(00:54):
describe the elevated prejudice that black women experience, or why
a study from the National Library of Medicine found that
gendered racism against Asian American women has gotten worse in
recent years, causing a community wide decrease in mental health.
Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at
four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the
(01:15):
world's most powerful countries passing laws that invalidate their existence
at best and enable transgenocide at worst. And that's just
studies that address people who identify as women. Non Binary
people face a whole separate type of discrimination. There's billions
of ways to be a woman online and most of
them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere
(01:37):
still tends to fucking suck. That's one of the first
things you learn on the internet. Don't be marginalized in
any way, or someone's going to threaten to kill you.
You could also fall in love or meet your best
friend in my case, all of the above. That's the
monkey paw of logging in. It's why when I was
twelve and posting on message boards lying out of my
(01:59):
app pretending to be a nineteen year old boy named
Aaron who wanted to store the band, I got legitimate
replies and asked what my favorite bands were. And when
I panicked and admitted I was a twelve year old girl,
the same people started asking me for pictures of myself
really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters
of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for
(02:21):
doing something. A father refuses to open a can of
beans for his daughter to teach her a lesson. A
husband loves his curvw wife a little too weird. And
then there are others who become the character of the
day for simply existing online. Come with me if you
will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super
(02:42):
heavy lift. You know it's not not recent. The day
was October twenty first. Kim Kardashian tried to go to
a fancy restaurant and an usher concert for her forty
second birthday, but ends up at an in and Out instead.
Liz Trust becomes the shortest lived UK Prime Minister of
all time and really designs after only six weeks. Midnights
(03:03):
by Taylor Swift comes out, introducing the extremely unpleasant lyric Someday,
I feel like everybody is a sexy baby into the world. Swifties,
Please don't contact me. I'm having a hard time right
now and I can't deal with you. Yes, October twenty
twenty two. In two short weeks, I would give a
speech at my friend's wedding and meet the man who
(03:24):
would ruin my life For the next nine months next
to a porta potty. So here's some obvious advice I
can give you. Never talk to a man you meet
next to a porta potty. The point is being a
woman online or in the world, or me specifically, is
a pain in the ass, and our main character is terrific.
(03:45):
Proof of that with a healthy dose of class dynamic
discussion to boot the wife who drank coffee in the garden,
your sixteenth minute begins. Now that's.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
Stay.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
On the morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two,
a twenty four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the
following from her Twitter account at litl Plant.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Mommy, my husband and I wake up every morning and
bring our coffee out to her garden and sit in
for hours every morning. It never gets old and we
never run out of things to talk to.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Love him so much, I know, really fucked up stuff.
The story here is young woman enjoys coffee and talking
with her husband for long periods of time. The reaction
to this story, well.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
I wake up every day with chronic pain carcel tunnel
syndrome and wash my OCD medication down with an iced
oat milk lattee.
Speaker 6 (05:39):
But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Put?
Speaker 6 (05:44):
What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work
and stuff?
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Lol?
Speaker 5 (05:49):
This is cute and no all that did you think
of all the people who wake up to where it
grueling hours, wake up on this streets alone or with
chronic pain? Before posting this, you should be mindful next
time before bragging about your picture perfect life. You might
upset someone.
Speaker 6 (06:05):
What is the purpose of this communication? I'm happy for you,
but it's just smug, self satisfied bragging. If it's true,
your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or
at least they should be. That is, unless you're flogging something.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
Very nice story, But haven't you been married for less
than four months? This phase will end, It always does.
Please don't be disheartened when it does. Remember love is
a choice, not a feeling.
Speaker 6 (06:36):
No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are
actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors. They
can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
They are capitalism.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
They don't even control the railways or the flow of commerce.
I know it's not the same thing, but it feels
like the same thing. I mean, Twitter is undefeated for
finding me only people on earth who can be crueler
to you than your own negative self talk, and that's
just a fact. But to be honest, I was in
a bad enough place when I saw this story that
(07:13):
while I recognized that the backlash to this poor woman
was ridiculous, I kind of resented her to every day.
I'm doing well financially, but I don't have talking to
my partner for hours in the garden every day money.
I don't even think I have garden money. And at
the time, I hadn't met anyone to either drink coffee
(07:34):
with or ruin my life with. But to my credit,
I had the wisdom to not participate in this discourse.
I did what I think is the much safer move,
thought about it privately, and kept my fucking mouth shut.
At the time I'm writing this, this tweet from at
Little Plant Mommy has three hundred and fourteen thousand likes.
(07:56):
This is about as close as it gets to a
full on public siahhing for saying something that isn't only
innocuous on its face, but also doesn't appear to be
courting attention outside of Daisy's Twitter circle at this time,
I think she technically qualifies as a micro influencer, so
less than twenty thousand followers, not just a rando talking
to people she only knows in real life, but by
(08:19):
no means someone who is courting a massive audience. You
probably follow one hundred people like this. I'm basically this,
And at the time this tweet was posted, Daisy had
a discernible aesthetic and things that she talked to her
audience about frequently, so for her, this tweet wouldn't have
been outside of the realm of a very normal post
(08:40):
that she would make about a year before this, the
only other time the Wayback Machine Internet.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Archives saved her page.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Daisy's bio read as.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Follows naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic
beauty specialist, branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
A few months before the tweet that shook the Earth,
she got married to a man named Matt who it
seems like she loved a whole lot. That's it, and
her tweets were maybe what you'd expect based on that
pretty niche with a lot of slightly woo woo wellness
talk that isn't for everyone, but wasn't trying to be.
As I read through some of her old stuff, I
(09:21):
didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't
think Dary is as bad as all that, but honestly,
I probably never would have found her account if it
weren't for this story. People with as many seven to
eleven loyalty points as I do are simply not buying
what our girl Daisy is selling. And by the way,
the reaction that some of these response tweets imply suggests
(09:42):
that Daisy owned a business that personified the grueling puppy
mill that is capitalism with the same energy as if
she were Jeff Bezos himself. Again, not true. Daisy ran
a small time esthetician business called The Holistic Esthetician, and
there's nothing wrong with that outside of being a little
(10:03):
hard for me to say. It doesn't even seem like
she has employees, and that might also explain her flexible hours.
And I can't emphasize enough that for this fairly small
account less than twenty thousand followers, this was not an
unusual post. The tweets posted around the same time were
pretty similar.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
The perfect balance of love and light but also real
raw and imperfect is what I'm always striving for. Balance. Baby,
that some highlights and a couple haircuts yesterday after months
of not doing hair, and they both turned out so
pretty makes me missdoing hair?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So why did this tweet about drinking coffee in the
garden blow up the Twitter algorithm? In a recent episode,
I spoke with Taylor Lorenz about the phenomenon of the dress,
and while Coffee Wife isn't a story she reported on
at the time, she has a lot of experience in
tracking stories like this, and what she found instructive about
(11:00):
the drinking coffee in the garden story wasn't that it
was more upsetting than your average woman doing something and
getting yelled at online story. It was that the stories
boost in the algorithm required both backlash to what Daisy
said and backlash to the backlash. Here's some of our
talk about that.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
Yeah, what was unique about that one too? Or what
I think is happening more and more with these newer
main characters, and I can think got to say Sidney
Sweeny's a good example of this more recently too, is
like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto
that person and they become this vehicle for making some
(11:44):
point about society, and I think we used to not
do that as much with our main characters. I think
they were just like we could appreciate that they were
funny or they were in a viral video or whatever.
And now it's like everything has to say something about
the world. And that's what I noticed when that went viral.
Initially people and.
Speaker 8 (12:04):
I think I mean districtly based on how the engagement
algorithm was working at that time, because a lot of
people were like, let's yell at her.
Speaker 9 (12:11):
Well, but it was not.
Speaker 7 (12:12):
It was an equal parts let's yell at her and
then people getting outraged that people were yelling at her,
And that is It's really important to have like both
of those, I think to reach the level of virality
that this did. But you know this is right, like
since Twitter has been leaning harder and harder into algorithmic
recommendations for years, but I think we've really seen it,
(12:35):
especially since the Elon era like really take hold. And
I think this is an example of Twitter leaning hard
into algorithmic recommendations where suddenly this person is in your
feed because everybody has an opinion on the commentary about it.
And everybody wants to again project, they want to use
this innocuous, benign, sort of generic tweet as a way
(12:57):
to posture about whatever want to talk.
Speaker 8 (13:00):
About totally, And I think, I mean, that's a really
great point that, like, you know, the wave of anger
towards this user is one thing, but the story doesn't
really thrive unless.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
She also has thousands of people coming to her defense,
even though she's tweeting, you know, into presumably to her
the void.
Speaker 8 (13:21):
Do you remember when that sort of phenomenon.
Speaker 7 (13:23):
Took Oh yeah, yeah, I was going to write about
this recently because there was this sort of similar thing
about door dash. Some person talked about door dash and
suddenly it was like five days of discourse of people
outraged about DoorDash, and then people outraged about the outrage.
But the outrage at people that are expressing they're very
you know, first of all, they shouldn't be expressing it
(13:45):
at that woman. But I can understand things are triggering
on the internet. Whatever they get triggered, but then it's
like the other people getting very triggered that anybody is triggered,
and it's just it just goes bananas. But yeah, I mean,
I think I'll so, just we're dealing with a lot
of really big problems in society, and people can't reach
(14:05):
the people that actually can affect change, and the people
that can affect change and have institutional power don't give
a shit what average people have to say if they
don't have money or access themselves to power. So these
main characters kind of become the only outlet for voicing
this anger, and people are used as props to make
these arguments or statements or whatever because they're at least accessible.
(14:30):
You know.
Speaker 8 (14:31):
Yeah, how have you seen, as you know, as our
feeds become algorithmically driven, how the treatment has changed with
regards to gender.
Speaker 7 (14:42):
Yeah, well, I think actually hatred of women is sort
of fueled virality on the Internet for years, and especially
since the beginning. I mean, I talk about it in
the book, But the people that really pioneered the content
creator industry and some of the people that put themselves
online first were women. And there's a specific type of
woman that gets a lot of hatred, which is sort
(15:03):
of a semi attractive or seemingly privileged women, usually an
upper middle class white woman. In one sense, they do
very well on the internet because they ascribe you know,
they ascribe to traditional beauty standards. You know, they're usually
somewhat attractive, somewhat privileged, enough to do well online or
enough to get attention online. But they're also subject to
(15:27):
some of the most vicious hate because it's just a
favorite pastime of the Internet to tear women down, specifically wives,
because there's this notion of like moms and wives like
always doing something wrong, or like it's misogyny. I mean,
it's just coore misogyny. And then there's of course a
separate type of really vicious hatred towards women of color
(15:47):
or also just ripped apart constantly. The thing is, they
don't really have the level of privilege, and so they
often some of these wives. Curvey Wife is a good example, right,
you know, she's sprung that into brand deals and has
a plus size clothing partnerships and all of this. Women
of color are not able to take advantage of that
virality and monetize it the same way. I mean, this
(16:10):
Coffee Wife woman doesn't sound like she's leaned into it,
but she could have released her own line of coffee
cups or whatever, you know, like and I don't know
what she looks like, but I think that people are
more accepting of privileged women, almost pivoting, even though they
receive an outside hatred. If you're a conventionally attractive wife, mother,
(16:31):
or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're
gonna get torn apart because that is what misogynis on
the internet. Love to come for Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Again to Taylor. Her book Extremely Online is available now.
So talking with Taylor reset how I was thinking about
this story a little. So to say that the legacy
of Coffee Wife is that people hate women online is
technically true, but a little undercooked. After talking to Taylor,
I'm convinced that this story is also a pretty damning
(17:03):
example of modern online algorithms gaming us to engage with
each other. Because, as I was going back through the
quote tweets reacting to Daisy's bold statement, the mean tweets
versus the defenses of Daisy are uneven. There's more nice
comments coming to her defense for every tweet that says
they are capitalism.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There's also this.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband, and
folks said not on my watch.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I can't afford coffee. The only thing I have to
drink in the garden is bird bathwater. Because I'm a robin,
I'm an actual bird. This tweet is not relatable to
my experience as a literal bird. I can't get a
house because I'm a bird and can't apply for a mortgage.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
Privileged bitch eat the rich has gone from no one
should be a billionaire to no one living above the
poverty level treating themselves and their husband to morning coffee
and their gardens should be happy.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
I feel like this is called causing so much uproar
because so many people are experiencing lovelessness and indifference from
people they're even romantically connected with, and seeing someone experience
friendship and love that seems calm, balanced and easy is infuriating.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And when it comes to the algorithm, once you've got
a class war about the class war, you are cooking.
In one of the last interviews Daisy gave on the
subject in December twenty twenty two with YouTuber and Jellylouz,
she described what it was like experiencing these waves of
discourse in what felt like a void.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
It just kind of like blew up within like ten
hours of it posting. I posted it, I noticed that
like a lot of people were like commenting and liking it,
and it was kind of going a little viral, and
like by the next day that I had posted it,
it was just like totally blown up with lots of
(18:56):
like lots of negativity and lots of like hate comments
and people saying all kinds of like crazy stuff about
me and my husband, and that kind of continued. The
negativity kind of continued for a little bit, but it
got to the point by like day like two or
three where like everybody was just coming in on the
(19:16):
post and being like this is actually so cute and
so nice, and like forget about all the haters and
like all of that stuff. And I feel like, I
mean when I try to go into the tweet and
like look for the negativity, I literally can't find negative
comments anymore because there's been so many thousands of people
that have just like drowned all of the like meanness
(19:37):
in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I
kind of think that it like went in this wave
of like negativity, and then there was like another wave
where it was like where it got more popular, but
then it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
She goes on to describe the few days of constant
attention and requests for comment by embracing the Coffee Lady persona,
even briefly adding it to her Twitter bio. And not
everyone would be able to do this, but she takes
it in stride, leaning into jokes that suggest that this
was all some big, evil plan. She tweets things like this,
(20:15):
this was all actually a big plot to draw everybody
in and then teach them about how to grow their
own food and heal the earth plant emoji and general
reflections on the weird, still developing media cycle of those
last few days in October, she directly confronts the criticism
in a gentle series of tweets.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
It's really sad to look at the thousands of hateful
comments on this post, most saying spending time with your
spouse is only for the rich, jobless trust fund kids,
saying our marriage won't last. It really shows why a
lot of marriages probably don't last. It's one thing to
get to spend hours a day with your partner, We
are very blessed, But most of the replies are implying
(20:54):
that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if
they do you must be rich, y'all are truly silly,
but thank you to all the sweet comments. I love
you so much, double heart emoji.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
And to directly address her haters who claimed that she
was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
To answer your questions, we are not rich by any means.
We've worked extremely hard to get to where we're at.
We live very minimally and consciously and work jobs that
match our lifestyle and allow us to live the life
that we do. Thank you for all the love that
uplifting comments. You know who you are red heart emoji.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
Then.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
I think this is a good example of how women
have to conduct themselves very carefully online to not get
anger from people. She's not ignoring it, but if it
does upset her in any way, which it could be
justified to do, she doesn't indicate that publicly. She and
her husband post a number of other pictures in their garden,
(21:52):
which it turns out is where they live in a
community in northern California, where he teaches yoga and she
runs her small esthetician business. They tweeted pictures of them
eating breakfast, drinking the famous coffee, and while they never
dropped their tax returns or the degree of privilege that
they grew up with, the question is, why should they
have to? Because the algorithm said so, There's no way
(22:16):
around it. This story was tailor made for the Internet
rage machine. Box writer Rebecca Jennings referenced as much in
a December twenty twenty two essay called every chronically online
conversation is the same, saying if you felt a creeping
sense of dread while reading about Daisy and her husband
enjoying coffee in their garden, it's possible you spend too
(22:37):
much time online. That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's
post has all the markers of Twitter rage bait, and
by rage bait, I mean a person sharing an experience
that may not be entirely universal. I mostly agree with
this and do feel that the anger towards Daisy is
wildly misplaced. This is the kind of anger we reserve
(23:01):
for Kardashians throwing parties during a pandemic, and this doesn't
invalidate any of the anger or frustration that online users
that were truly sorry triggered by Daisy's inoffensive post. Fault
I mean hell, Daisy herself articulated this feeling better than
anyone else here. She is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
You know, as far as what I could say to
the people that were doing all of that is, I
just think when you're exuding that much hate to other people,
that comes from a place in your heart that's hurt,
because I truly believe that you know everything that like,
we're all just mirrors of each other, and something about
me made them feel something about themselves that was probably
(23:47):
trauma from who knows when in their life, and that
caused something and caused them to feel that way. So
I think that that just comes. That kind of behavior
just comes from someone being hurt. And I understand that,
and I have compascity for those people because truly, maybe
they know better, but they probably don't know any better.
They're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing with
(24:08):
it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
So thankfully Coffee Wife had a mellow enough lifestyle to
forgive and was offline enough to understand the anger without
becoming enraged. Back when it comes to women behaving in
a very particular way to not get a particular reaction.
Daisy did everything right. All she did wrong was exist
(24:33):
in a way that the algorithm was liable to boost.
When I started this show, the person who was most insistent,
along with hundreds of others that I talk about coffee wife,
was my best friend Julia, and I wanted to know why,
because no matter where you fell at the time, what
happened over the coffee in the garden tweet was a
pretty classic public shaming. And Julia is a great comic
(24:55):
and writer who wrote a controversial essay for Gawker in
twenty twenty two called in Defense of Shame. She's literally
an authority on shame, and not just because she grew
up Catholic in New England. But that certainly didn't hurt,
and Julia feels strongly that Daisy was not deserving of
the backlash she got. So when is shame a necessary
(25:16):
tool and when is it? Whatever the fuck this is,
I wanted to ask her about it first.
Speaker 9 (25:22):
I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at
Crooked Media.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
You are the person that I associate most with like
intensely feeling about this story.
Speaker 9 (25:35):
I am the person you most associate with the concept
of shame.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an
interview here by also because yeah, like you felt really
strongly that this woman had been shamed improperly, but you
do feel tell me your feelings about a proper shaming.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
A few years ago, I wrote piece for gaker Rip
called in Defense of Shame. Was kind of immediately criticized
by people who didn't read the piece as a defense
being a defensive shaming. People were basically saying that I
was co signing dog pile culture, co signing shaming, which
(26:20):
is not at all what I was talking about in
the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Uh.
Speaker 9 (26:30):
It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of
a reflective experience, not an external experience. Shame is for
Shame is for me. It's not for you, you know, it's
like so to me. I mean basically, like my my
(26:52):
defense of shame was that more people need to be
kind of in touch with their own shame. And I
honestly think that like a lot of the I think
the fact that a lot of people aren't is the
reason why they end up projecting on other people. But yeah,
this was one of those things like that was a
(27:13):
clear case of shaming in a way that was completely
needless and silly. Honestly, you're yelling at this twenty something
woman because she's having a lovely morning, right, kill yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
Speaker 9 (27:39):
That's a really good question. I think you have to.
I think if there is, you really have to be
punching up. Like the whole thing with Coffee wife is
that she was just some kind of like random lady.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
It's very different if we're all piling on to like
I mean, there are some people who are really impervious
to it. So it like, you know, Elon Musk seems
to just revel in the fact that everyone hates him.
But as far as a productive way to shame, to
shame the average per I mean no, I don't think so,
(28:15):
and I and I really again, I don't advocate for
shame as an external force. I think all of our
shame should be internal, and it should be between us
and the Lord. Your parents are going to be so pleased,
I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish, your impact
(28:36):
has felt on this podcast absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire.
But you can catch every day over at Crooked Media
and we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's
sixteenth minute. Welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had
(29:07):
six cups of coffee and still no husband in sight.
We're talking coffee wife. So not to twenty sixteen ghostbusters
this situation. But take a second to imagine how this
story would be different if it were a husband tweeting
about enjoying time with his wife in said garden. I
really don't think the reaction would be the same. In
the context of hetero couples. Husbands who adore their wives
(29:31):
tend to be lifted up as wife guys in the
same way that they're more easily rewarded socially for being
an active part of their children's lives. And while there's
intersecting issues that caused people to project onto Coffee Wife,
I still think this boiled down to an Internet classic.
Women are fair game for just about anything. There's no
social incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband,
(29:54):
because when a woman adores spending time with her husband,
so what it would be selfish of her and not
love spending time with him when a woman takes good
care of and loves her children, So what, That's the
natural expectation, and coming up short in either department is
still met with easier, more reflexive criticism, even with gains
(30:14):
made in general gender perception.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
But while I do firmly.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Believe that Daisy was dragged online for simply being happy,
I want to state the obvious and say, of course
women can fucking suck online. There's plenty of precedent for that,
because women are people, and there are clear patterns en
mass and as individuals for assists white women specifically like
Daisy and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best,
(30:40):
bigoted and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarchy and capitalism rewards,
and being generally a condescending piece of shit to people
who are more marginalized than themselves. That's a lot of
words to say a no longer trendy term that is
still somewhat useful, and it is girl boss. There's a
bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as
simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who
(31:04):
is ambitious and successful in her career unquote, and others
as I think of the girl boss are connected more
closely to women using the language of feminism to accrue
power while actively upholding the status quo. Probably the most
famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the
best seller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women
(31:24):
to advocate for themselves in the workplace. She is the
ultimate girl boss to me for a few reasons. First
of all, she is a huge beneficiary of capitalism that
is actively harmful. She was the COO of Facebook during
years and years of infinite growth. And second of all,
she's using her position as a powerful woman to sell
(31:46):
you something and not something. Is that the only thing
holding you back as a woman in the workplace is
not the system you find yourself in, but something you
are neglecting to do it self. Helps snake oil that
bullies the women who are reading it.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Here's a quote.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but
this is where we are. If you want the outcome
to be different, you will have to do something about it. Oh,
it's your fault. She also says this, we need to
stop telling women get a mentor and you will excel. Instead,
we need to tell them excel and you will get
a mentor Oh it's my fault, twenty dollars well spent,
(32:27):
thanks Cheryl. That's the kind of girl boss shit we're
talking about. So a very instructive term that is often
misused after being sucked into this linguistic, misogynist vortex. The
difficulty with the girl boss tag gets to why I
think Coffee Wife was done so dirty. There are people
who aren't big fans of women who glommed onto this
(32:50):
word to use it interchangeably with all women or women
who had any power over them at work. If your
manager is a woman, that doesn't mean she is cynically
using tools of the patriarchy to oppress you while assuring
other women they're doing something wrong in order to personally profit.
It's a very specific set of behaviors, and being a
(33:11):
girl boss doesn't mean the women in question haven't experienced
gender discrimination themselves. In fact, I'd wager that all of
them have. This simply does not describe a woo woo
twenty four year old drinking coffee in the garden. The
anger is valid, but it is misplaced. Daisy wasn't trying
to make money by saying this. She wasn't aiming to
(33:33):
change minds or hurt anyone, or, according to her, even
reach outside of her normal audience. She was just sharing
something you know, like we're told is the whole point
of social media, And given the state of Twitter in
the fall of twenty twenty two and on this specific week,
the algorithm pushing this high engagement story makes a lot
(33:56):
of sense. There were a number of algorithmic shifts on
Twitter and in social media writ large in this year.
If you're a Twitter user yourself or I'm not going
to say X, please don't contact me about this. If
you're a Twitter user yourself or a proud Twitter retiree,
you might remember when their timeline became completely algorithmically driven
(34:17):
instead of what it had been for years and years,
which was a real time feed of people you had
chosen to follow. Now, people you didn't follow would be
sorted to the top of your feed if the algorithm
thought you were likely to interact with the post based
on what you'd interacted with in the past, and the
people you actually chose to follow might see their content
get pushed further and further down. Users got really pissed
(34:42):
off about this, and Twitter tried to mitigate the issue
by splitting everything into two feeds, So if you opened
the website on your laptop, it would default the new
shitty algorithm feed and you could shift over to the
timeline you'd had for fifteen years. But it would take
some effort, and it's ghost like daisies that would get
sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed, the one you
(35:06):
didn't ask for and the one that no one is
prepared to be sorted into. And within a week of
the coffee Wi flare up, a looming Twitter acquisition was
finally completed. After months of legal wrangling and negotiation, Elon
Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter. Earlier in
(35:27):
twenty twenty two, Elon Musk, who I think we can
all agree only had the best intentions and deserves the
benefit of the doubt, offered to buy Twitter on a
whim for fifty four dollars and twenty cents a share,
just months after he'd become the company's largest shareholder at
nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal at forty
four billion dollars, and Twitter accepted the offer very quickly.
(35:51):
They genuinely didn't seem to think he'd go through with
it and accepted to all but resist a hostile takeover
from Musk, But Musk, determined to pivot the platform to
white supremacy, doubled down, declaring that his ownership would mean
less bots and more free speech. He certainly made good
on the former in the fascist content is king sense,
(36:13):
but the crackdown on bots is pretty hilarious for a
site that I can't even pay to stop auto posting
my pussy and bio underneath pictures of me and my
infant nephew. So yeah, this change of ownership was famously
a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out of the
objectively bad deal that was his idea in July, but
(36:34):
wasn't able to and was all but forced to go
through with the deal less than a week after. Daisy
was declared the Coffee Wife, and what happened after that
was well, it's why Twitter has been in sharp decline
ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents since
this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones back
(36:58):
to Twitter and generally promoting, challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a
cage match, and tanking the company's net worth by over
fifty percent. There's a very depressing lens that we can
see the coffee wife incident through as this dying gasp
of old school misogyny on Twitter moments before it was
(37:20):
about to get much, much, much worse, and how bad
hasn't gotten on the internet since twenty twenty two. I
went to an expert, my pal Bridget Todd, host of
(37:43):
the Incredible podcast there are No Girls on the Internet.
Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd.
Speaker 11 (37:50):
I am the host and creator of Iheartradios Tech and
culture podcast. There are no girls on the Internet, And
I guess you could say I'm a tech Internet enthusiast, aficionado,
whatever you want to say.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
I'm excited to talk coffee wife with you. Why do
you think that people had such a strong emotional reaction
to coffee Wife.
Speaker 11 (38:11):
Well, one, I think it's absolutely algorithmic, right. I think
that we know a lot about how algorithms work. I
think that they absolutely are feeding us and pushing us
content that is going to elicit strong reactions, emotional reactions
from us. So even if you don't know this woman,
don't follow this woman. She wasn't like somebody who had
a ton of followers. She had a relatively small account.
(38:32):
Platforms know this is content that it's eliciting strong reaction,
strong engagement. Let's make sure that more people see it,
you know, that's the name of the game for platforms. However,
I do think that the timeframe kind of matters, Like
I think that this was a time where do you
remember how in the very beginning of the pandemic we
(38:53):
were Also there was a sort of novelty to it
where it was like, who knows what's happening? But then
that kind of were off, and then it was like, well,
I guess this is just all of our lives now.
And I think that this happened at a time when
a lot of people were just sort of grappling with that.
I think for me personally, it was a time where
I was spending way more time than I should have
been on screens on the internet, really paying a lot
(39:15):
of attention to what strangers on the Internet were doing,
because I didn't have a lot going on outside of that, right,
I wasn't going out the way I used to all
of that, And I also think we were all feeling
the sort of like existential dread of how reality feels
right now. Right, everything is expensive, Rents are rising, Inflation
is terrible. It just feels like we are being squeezed
(39:36):
from so many different ankles.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
And so when somebody comes along.
Speaker 11 (39:40):
With just pure the pure joy of a you know,
having coffee in their garden with their husband every morning,
and you know, isn't this nice, it's like a trigger
that It's not surprising to me that it was this
big tension point for so many people.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've
been having, I'd be curious what you think about that,
Like how the pandemic sort of warped our relationship to
the internet and what it looks like trying to sort
of return to straddling real life and internet life.
Speaker 11 (40:12):
Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you
on that.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
I mean, I can speak for myself.
Speaker 11 (40:20):
I am not proud of what the pandemic, how I
responded to the pandemic socially, right, I also am a
pretty socially anxious person. I'm somebody who's in my head
a lot, and I'm not proud to say this, but
I would bet that I'm not the only person who
feels this way. I think during the pandemic. You know,
we were watching people die, we were watching people lose
(40:41):
loved ones, we were watching people lose their livelihoods. It
was a really tough time, and so it was hard
for me as somebody who luckily was very privileged, and
that that wasn't the case for me, right, Like I
got COVID. People I know got COVID, but thankfully I
didn't lose my loved ones.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
It wasn't impacting me the way that it was.
Speaker 11 (40:59):
I'm not an essential right, and so I think that
for me personally, it was strange to deep to grapple
with that, this feeling of like I am going through
a tough time and so is everyone. I think it
for me created this dynamic where I hate to say it,
but I was very much like what about my pain?
(41:20):
You know, Like why is like when is it going
to be my turn for somebody to see me? Like
I wasn't an essential worker. Nobody around me died, but
I still had a tough time. I was finding myself
in this like almost very narcissistic place of wanting somebody
to acknowledge what I had been through. And so I
think with Coffee Lady, I think it was a lot
(41:40):
of people who perhaps were wanting someone to see their pain,
wanting others to acknowledge their pain and their anxiety and
their loneliness and their frustration, which is something that I
can relate to really deeply, and so I think that's
part of why, because some of the replies that she
got would be like, I can't afford it, Garden, I
(42:00):
don't have a husband. You know, I'm alone here, I
don't have any friends, Like people really making it about
themselves and what they lack, and like something about that
tweet I think highlighted the lack that a lot of
people were feeling. And I just I really, it's easy
to dunk on these people and be like, Wow, you're
so dysregulated that that's that this woman, this random woman's
(42:22):
tweet is making you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
But I also kind of get it.
Speaker 9 (42:25):
You're totally right.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
And I know I've been guilty of this in the
past and probably during the pandemic era Internet, where you're
taking like your personal pain and I've had moments where
I'm like, I don't want to see someone happy right
now because I'm not, And like, I think that there's
a lot of that, but some of it is sort
of manifesting as a political statement. I can't quite get
(42:46):
my head around that phenomenon because I don't want to
discount the fact that like class rage and class anxiety online.
I mean, it makes total sense. I experienced it a lot,
especially it's sort of the further back you go, but
she's so clearly not the person that can. I think
it's interesting online when people dogpile on someone who cannot
(43:10):
help them, right.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
I do think there's a gendered aspect to it.
Speaker 11 (43:15):
I haven't really kind of grappled with this too much
just yet, but like I know, for me, when I'm
scrolling TikTok or Instagram, there is something about the visualization
of a woman who seems like she's got her shit together,
she's got it all figured out. She wears the perfect
two piece you know, workout set, she eats right, she
starts her day with like lemon water or macha instead
(43:37):
of coffee.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
It is three gorgeous children who are wealthy act yeah.
Speaker 11 (43:42):
Exactly, And so I think that coffee ladies tweet, at
least for me, triggered a kind of very gendered, almost
like politicized anxiety that there are women out there who
are doing it right and bridget you are doing it wrong,
like something about like like there has never been a
day where I'm able to start my day.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
Speaker 11 (44:06):
I actually do have a small garden, and I never
start my day out there because I start my day
like most people, like frazzled late for a call, just
trying to chug some coffee while I'm getting dressed, like
doing a million other things. Sure I shouldn't be taking
a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
But who does that right?
Speaker 11 (44:27):
And so I think there is something where women are
told that you have to in order to sort of
signal that you have it together, your mornings have to
look like X Y Z. And I think that something
about coffee Lady, something about that tweet signaled to women
like I've got it all together? Do you feel like
craft that you don't. I don't think she was. I
(44:47):
certainly don't think she was trying to do that. But
that's I think that's probably how it hit some of us.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
The Internet, I think, like a lot of things, is
sort of built to make women angry at each other. Yes,
and present each other and yeah, I mean, could you
speak to that a little bit? I know that that's
your beat.
Speaker 11 (45:04):
Yes, I mean, it's just a document, a well documented fact.
Algorithms want women to feel like shit. They want women
to be comparing themselves to other women, they want women
to be feeling bad. They want women to be feeling
like crap all the time. And algorithms and platforms and
tech leaders make money off of women feeling like shit
(45:24):
about themselves.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
That's just a fact, right.
Speaker 11 (45:26):
And so if you've ever been scrolling Instagram or TikTok
or whatever and you keep being surfaced content that makes
you feel like crap, that's not you. You're not crazy
or sensitive. Algorithms and platforms do that with intention because
it keeps you on the platform longer, it keeps you
coming back, and it makes them money. It is a
very twisted dynamic that we are a cog in this
(45:48):
cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off
of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Being in competition with each other.
Speaker 11 (45:57):
And rather than like celebrating the ways that we are different,
celebrating the ways in which like, oh, well, like my
brand is this, I'm a hot mess, I own it.
Speaker 3 (46:05):
Whatever.
Speaker 11 (46:05):
Whatever algorithms trick us into thinking that all of these
great things that make us who we are are actually foibles,
are actually bad And yeah, I mean there's been study
after study that shows that the more time you spend
on particularly Instagram, the more young women feel bad about themselves,
the more body anxiety they have, the more likely they
are to engage in things like food issues or disordered eating.
(46:28):
And none of that is by mistake and it's all
by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
And that and that would also apply to Coffee Life.
That people were attacking her as if she was like
the root cause of it. It was very strange. I
forget who I was talking to the other day about
how they felt like they had fucked up their algorithm
because they said that they weren't interested in something and
the algorithm kept serving that to them because they cared
(46:56):
enough to say I'm not interested. And the only way
to true, truly demonstrate you're not interested is to keep
scrolling and don't stop. But like if you are, if
you theoretically you know, see like a coffee wife, TikTok
come up and you care enough to say I don't
like this, the algorithm will serve it to you again.
(47:17):
And so I ran an experiment and it's completely true,
like that the kind of content I went out of
my way to say I don't like this. The algorithm
responds by being like, well, maybe you'll interact with it
negatively because it makes you feel bad.
Speaker 11 (47:31):
Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
I completely agree with you.
Speaker 11 (47:37):
And imagine how harmful that is when it's content that
you find triggering. Right, when it's content that you have
identified like that might not be safe or healthy for
me to see and engage with. Right if the algorithm
has has gleaned like, oh, she has a little bit
of an issue with X y Z. Let's keep showing
it to her and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Yeah, really, that cool.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
The part that's hard is even when I'm looking for it,
it's hard to escape the like emotional experience of I
don't want to see that, and like feeling that your
anger for whatever reason does seem to it routes at
the person because you can't you know the real kind
of Yeah, this sounds conspiratorial, but like the real enemy
(48:19):
has no face right, And so I feel like there
is this sort of very human instinct to try to
place a face and a name to what is bothering you,
when in reality it is something much larger, like you know,
social media algorithms that are trying to make you upset,
like the concept of class and like these huge things.
(48:43):
And it's finding a sort of villain of the day
to take it out on, even when that person sucks.
In this case, they didn't, but sometimes they do, but
it still doesn't it's so unproductive.
Speaker 11 (48:55):
Yeah, we are making a bunch of random people proxies
for a lot of our very valid anger and pain
and fear. That's why I always say, like, we're it's
a game and we're all being played. The only winner
here are tech platforms and people who run them and
people who make money from them. And so even if
you are running a successful little grift for a while,
(49:15):
engagement mating and all of that, all it takes is
one algorithmic tweak and then no one's You don't have
the eyeballs or the attention of the world any longer.
And so, yeah, it's it's a game, and we're all
being played.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Speaker 11 (49:35):
Something that I found really interesting about the Coffee Wife
saga was how everybody assumed she was wealthy because she
has a garden. And I found that to be really
interesting because she was like, Oh, it's not like a
fancy garden, it's just a small garden in my like
regular home.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
I think that it.
Speaker 11 (49:53):
Is very easy and I say this because I've done
it to trick yourself into thinking, like, the things that
I want I can't have. I am, I am, I
could never have a garden. And I think that that
really the Coffee Wife thing really showed me that a
lot of us feel like we can't have things that
we actually can have. I don't know if that makes sense,
(50:16):
but the fact that so many people were like, well,
you have to be rich to have a garden, and
it's like, well, actually, I don't think that's the case,
and people who are not rich have gardens all the time,
And like, why are you assuming that the pastime of
gardening is something that only the wealthy can do. Even
if you live in a small apartment, you can still
have like a window garden or something. I think that
I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the
things that we want we cannot have.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
So that's one two.
Speaker 11 (50:39):
I would say, yeah, we really have to be better
at understanding where we put our pain and who we
make the proxies for our pain. I would say, if
the person you are tweeting at cannot change the circumstances
that you're upset about, maybe you're putting your rage and
your anger and your emotionality in the wrong place, and
(51:01):
that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality
to the right places.
Speaker 7 (51:05):
Right.
Speaker 11 (51:06):
I know those places tend to be structural and institutional
and faithless, but we gotta really have a sense of
what forces are actually making us unhappy, and it's probably
not this lady drinking coffee in her garden.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Thank you so much to bridget Todd. Listen to there
are no girls on the internet every single week, I
sure do. So what became of our coffee wife legend?
Daisy didn't respond to my request for an interview, and
I respect that she just wants to be a person
who does pleasant things with people she likes. Some people
(51:41):
just don't want a dumb bitch podcaster interfering with their life,
and I have to accept that as far as her
online persona, Daisy is no longer Coffee Wife. She is
Daisy and appears to be spending her time generally not
on Twitter nowadays. She lives in Bali, India, and is
returning to her lashes business later in the year. I
(52:03):
have no idea if she's a wife, if she drinks coffee,
but she's certainly Daisy, and I like Daisy, and with
that the coffee wife. Your sixteenth minute ends. Now, Okay,
I'm on the couch with my boyfriend drinking coffee. Close enough.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
Oh I should I guess it?
Speaker 6 (52:28):
Should hold I should hold it.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
You're right, get your coffee.
Speaker 5 (52:30):
Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've
gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
Speaker 9 (52:38):
And we don't have a garden. We do have a.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Little deck, but I just kind of we have.
Speaker 5 (52:45):
A bug in the house though, Casper, Casper, two.
Speaker 9 (52:49):
Bugs, we do, two bugs.
Speaker 8 (52:51):
I just the deck kind of stresses me out because
there's so much pollution. Who we're across the street from
a We shouldn't say where we.
Speaker 5 (52:58):
Are, No, we should, but you can visualize the pollution
because we can see.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
All of the gathering dust.
Speaker 5 (53:03):
Just so much dust the accumulated ducks.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
Speaker 5 (53:08):
They are, they're kissing right now, and there's looking Casper's forehead.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're
the same size.
Speaker 10 (53:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
It's great.
Speaker 5 (53:20):
We could try this in a garden at some point though,
don't you think.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to
Grant Creator and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet
(53:51):
shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my cat's fleeing
Casper and by pet Rothbert who will outload us all.
Bye b
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but
being a woman on the internet sucks.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It is bad.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is so bad that maybe you just rolled your
eyes at hearing me say it, like, well, a white
millennial just said being a woman online is actually really hard,
and not to be that brave white millennial. But yes,
it really sucks being a woman on the internet, and
it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl,
(00:31):
non binary, really just not a cis man online and
other random online users know that, particularly anonymous people, you'll
get a crash course in gender discrimination the likes of
which you could not imagine. And of course this happens
across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogynir to
(00:54):
describe the elevated prejudice that black women experience, or why
a study from the National Library of Medicine found that
gendered racism against Asian American women has gotten worse in
recent years, causing a community wide decrease in mental health.
Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at
four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the
(01:15):
world's most powerful countries passing laws that invalidate their existence
at best and enable transgenocide at worst. And that's just
studies that address people who identify as women. Non Binary
people face a whole separate type of discrimination. There's billions
of ways to be a woman online and most of
them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere
(01:37):
still tends to fucking suck. That's one of the first
things you learn on the internet. Don't be marginalized in
any way, or someone's going to threaten to kill you.
You could also fall in love or meet your best
friend in my case, all of the above. That's the
monkey paw of logging in. It's why when I was
twelve and posting on message boards lying out of my
(01:59):
app pretending to be a nineteen year old boy named
Aaron who wanted to store the band, I got legitimate
replies and asked what my favorite bands were. And when
I panicked and admitted I was a twelve year old girl,
the same people started asking me for pictures of myself
really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters
of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for
(02:21):
doing something. A father refuses to open a can of
beans for his daughter to teach her a lesson. A
husband loves his curvw wife a little too weird. And
then there are others who become the character of the
day for simply existing online. Come with me if you
will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super
(02:42):
heavy lift. You know it's not not recent. The day
was October twenty first. Kim Kardashian tried to go to
a fancy restaurant and an usher concert for her forty
second birthday, but ends up at an in and Out instead.
Liz Trust becomes the shortest lived UK Prime Minister of
all time and really designs after only six weeks. Midnights
(03:03):
by Taylor Swift comes out, introducing the extremely unpleasant lyric Someday,
I feel like everybody is a sexy baby into the world. Swifties,
Please don't contact me. I'm having a hard time right
now and I can't deal with you. Yes, October twenty
twenty two. In two short weeks, I would give a
speech at my friend's wedding and meet the man who
(03:24):
would ruin my life For the next nine months next
to a porta potty. So here's some obvious advice I
can give you. Never talk to a man you meet
next to a porta potty. The point is being a
woman online or in the world, or me specifically, is
a pain in the ass, and our main character is terrific.
(03:45):
Proof of that with a healthy dose of class dynamic
discussion to boot the wife who drank coffee in the garden,
your sixteenth minute begins. Now that's.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
Stay.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
On the morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two,
a twenty four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the
following from her Twitter account at litl Plant.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Mommy, my husband and I wake up every morning and
bring our coffee out to her garden and sit in
for hours every morning. It never gets old and we
never run out of things to talk to.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Love him so much, I know, really fucked up stuff.
The story here is young woman enjoys coffee and talking
with her husband for long periods of time. The reaction
to this story, well.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
I wake up every day with chronic pain carcel tunnel
syndrome and wash my OCD medication down with an iced
oat milk lattee.
Speaker 6 (05:39):
But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Put?
Speaker 6 (05:44):
What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work
and stuff?
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Lol?
Speaker 5 (05:49):
This is cute and no all that did you think
of all the people who wake up to where it
grueling hours, wake up on this streets alone or with
chronic pain? Before posting this, you should be mindful next
time before bragging about your picture perfect life. You might
upset someone.
Speaker 6 (06:05):
What is the purpose of this communication? I'm happy for you,
but it's just smug, self satisfied bragging. If it's true,
your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or
at least they should be. That is, unless you're flogging something.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
Very nice story, But haven't you been married for less
than four months? This phase will end, It always does.
Please don't be disheartened when it does. Remember love is
a choice, not a feeling.
Speaker 6 (06:36):
No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are
actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors. They
can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
They are capitalism.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
They don't even control the railways or the flow of commerce.
I know it's not the same thing, but it feels
like the same thing. I mean, Twitter is undefeated for
finding me only people on earth who can be crueler
to you than your own negative self talk, and that's
just a fact. But to be honest, I was in
a bad enough place when I saw this story that
(07:13):
while I recognized that the backlash to this poor woman
was ridiculous, I kind of resented her to every day.
I'm doing well financially, but I don't have talking to
my partner for hours in the garden every day money.
I don't even think I have garden money. And at
the time, I hadn't met anyone to either drink coffee
(07:34):
with or ruin my life with. But to my credit,
I had the wisdom to not participate in this discourse.
I did what I think is the much safer move,
thought about it privately, and kept my fucking mouth shut.
At the time I'm writing this, this tweet from at
Little Plant Mommy has three hundred and fourteen thousand likes.
(07:56):
This is about as close as it gets to a
full on public siahhing for saying something that isn't only
innocuous on its face, but also doesn't appear to be
courting attention outside of Daisy's Twitter circle at this time,
I think she technically qualifies as a micro influencer, so
less than twenty thousand followers, not just a rando talking
to people she only knows in real life, but by
(08:19):
no means someone who is courting a massive audience. You
probably follow one hundred people like this. I'm basically this,
And at the time this tweet was posted, Daisy had
a discernible aesthetic and things that she talked to her
audience about frequently, so for her, this tweet wouldn't have
been outside of the realm of a very normal post
(08:40):
that she would make about a year before this, the
only other time the Wayback Machine Internet.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Archives saved her page.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Daisy's bio read as.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Follows naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic
beauty specialist, branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
A few months before the tweet that shook the Earth,
she got married to a man named Matt who it
seems like she loved a whole lot. That's it, and
her tweets were maybe what you'd expect based on that
pretty niche with a lot of slightly woo woo wellness
talk that isn't for everyone, but wasn't trying to be.
As I read through some of her old stuff, I
(09:21):
didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't
think Dary is as bad as all that, but honestly,
I probably never would have found her account if it
weren't for this story. People with as many seven to
eleven loyalty points as I do are simply not buying
what our girl Daisy is selling. And by the way,
the reaction that some of these response tweets imply suggests
(09:42):
that Daisy owned a business that personified the grueling puppy
mill that is capitalism with the same energy as if
she were Jeff Bezos himself. Again, not true. Daisy ran
a small time esthetician business called The Holistic Esthetician, and
there's nothing wrong with that outside of being a little
(10:03):
hard for me to say. It doesn't even seem like
she has employees, and that might also explain her flexible hours.
And I can't emphasize enough that for this fairly small
account less than twenty thousand followers, this was not an
unusual post. The tweets posted around the same time were
pretty similar.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
The perfect balance of love and light but also real
raw and imperfect is what I'm always striving for. Balance. Baby,
that some highlights and a couple haircuts yesterday after months
of not doing hair, and they both turned out so
pretty makes me missdoing hair?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
So why did this tweet about drinking coffee in the
garden blow up the Twitter algorithm? In a recent episode,
I spoke with Taylor Lorenz about the phenomenon of the dress,
and while Coffee Wife isn't a story she reported on
at the time, she has a lot of experience in
tracking stories like this, and what she found instructive about
(11:00):
the drinking coffee in the garden story wasn't that it
was more upsetting than your average woman doing something and
getting yelled at online story. It was that the stories
boost in the algorithm required both backlash to what Daisy
said and backlash to the backlash. Here's some of our
talk about that.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
Yeah, what was unique about that one too? Or what
I think is happening more and more with these newer
main characters, and I can think got to say Sidney
Sweeny's a good example of this more recently too, is
like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto
that person and they become this vehicle for making some
(11:44):
point about society, and I think we used to not
do that as much with our main characters. I think
they were just like we could appreciate that they were
funny or they were in a viral video or whatever.
And now it's like everything has to say something about
the world. And that's what I noticed when that went viral.
Initially people and.
Speaker 8 (12:04):
I think I mean districtly based on how the engagement
algorithm was working at that time, because a lot of
people were like, let's yell at her.
Speaker 9 (12:11):
Well, but it was not.
Speaker 7 (12:12):
It was an equal parts let's yell at her and
then people getting outraged that people were yelling at her,
And that is It's really important to have like both
of those, I think to reach the level of virality
that this did. But you know this is right, like
since Twitter has been leaning harder and harder into algorithmic
recommendations for years, but I think we've really seen it,
(12:35):
especially since the Elon era like really take hold. And
I think this is an example of Twitter leaning hard
into algorithmic recommendations where suddenly this person is in your
feed because everybody has an opinion on the commentary about it.
And everybody wants to again project, they want to use
this innocuous, benign, sort of generic tweet as a way
(12:57):
to posture about whatever want to talk.
Speaker 8 (13:00):
About totally, And I think, I mean, that's a really
great point that, like, you know, the wave of anger
towards this user is one thing, but the story doesn't
really thrive unless.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
She also has thousands of people coming to her defense,
even though she's tweeting, you know, into presumably to her
the void.
Speaker 8 (13:21):
Do you remember when that sort of phenomenon.
Speaker 7 (13:23):
Took Oh yeah, yeah, I was going to write about
this recently because there was this sort of similar thing
about door dash. Some person talked about door dash and
suddenly it was like five days of discourse of people
outraged about DoorDash, and then people outraged about the outrage.
But the outrage at people that are expressing they're very
you know, first of all, they shouldn't be expressing it
(13:45):
at that woman. But I can understand things are triggering
on the internet. Whatever they get triggered, but then it's
like the other people getting very triggered that anybody is triggered,
and it's just it just goes bananas. But yeah, I mean,
I think I'll so, just we're dealing with a lot
of really big problems in society, and people can't reach
(14:05):
the people that actually can affect change, and the people
that can affect change and have institutional power don't give
a shit what average people have to say if they
don't have money or access themselves to power. So these
main characters kind of become the only outlet for voicing
this anger, and people are used as props to make
these arguments or statements or whatever because they're at least accessible.
(14:30):
You know.
Speaker 8 (14:31):
Yeah, how have you seen, as you know, as our
feeds become algorithmically driven, how the treatment has changed with
regards to gender.
Speaker 7 (14:42):
Yeah, well, I think actually hatred of women is sort
of fueled virality on the Internet for years, and especially
since the beginning. I mean, I talk about it in
the book, But the people that really pioneered the content
creator industry and some of the people that put themselves
online first were women. And there's a specific type of
woman that gets a lot of hatred, which is sort
(15:03):
of a semi attractive or seemingly privileged women, usually an
upper middle class white woman. In one sense, they do
very well on the internet because they ascribe you know,
they ascribe to traditional beauty standards. You know, they're usually
somewhat attractive, somewhat privileged, enough to do well online or
enough to get attention online. But they're also subject to
(15:27):
some of the most vicious hate because it's just a
favorite pastime of the Internet to tear women down, specifically wives,
because there's this notion of like moms and wives like
always doing something wrong, or like it's misogyny. I mean,
it's just coore misogyny. And then there's of course a
separate type of really vicious hatred towards women of color
(15:47):
or also just ripped apart constantly. The thing is, they
don't really have the level of privilege, and so they
often some of these wives. Curvey Wife is a good example, right,
you know, she's sprung that into brand deals and has
a plus size clothing partnerships and all of this. Women
of color are not able to take advantage of that
virality and monetize it the same way. I mean, this
(16:10):
Coffee Wife woman doesn't sound like she's leaned into it,
but she could have released her own line of coffee
cups or whatever, you know, like and I don't know
what she looks like, but I think that people are
more accepting of privileged women, almost pivoting, even though they
receive an outside hatred. If you're a conventionally attractive wife, mother,
(16:31):
or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're
gonna get torn apart because that is what misogynis on
the internet. Love to come for Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Again to Taylor. Her book Extremely Online is available now.
So talking with Taylor reset how I was thinking about
this story a little. So to say that the legacy
of Coffee Wife is that people hate women online is
technically true, but a little undercooked. After talking to Taylor,
I'm convinced that this story is also a pretty damning
(17:03):
example of modern online algorithms gaming us to engage with
each other. Because, as I was going back through the
quote tweets reacting to Daisy's bold statement, the mean tweets
versus the defenses of Daisy are uneven. There's more nice
comments coming to her defense for every tweet that says
they are capitalism.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There's also this.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband, and
folks said not on my watch.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I can't afford coffee. The only thing I have to
drink in the garden is bird bathwater. Because I'm a robin,
I'm an actual bird. This tweet is not relatable to
my experience as a literal bird. I can't get a
house because I'm a bird and can't apply for a mortgage.
Speaker 6 (17:47):
Privileged bitch eat the rich has gone from no one
should be a billionaire to no one living above the
poverty level treating themselves and their husband to morning coffee
and their gardens should be happy.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
I feel like this is called causing so much uproar
because so many people are experiencing lovelessness and indifference from
people they're even romantically connected with, and seeing someone experience
friendship and love that seems calm, balanced and easy is infuriating.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And when it comes to the algorithm, once you've got
a class war about the class war, you are cooking.
In one of the last interviews Daisy gave on the
subject in December twenty twenty two with YouTuber and Jellylouz,
she described what it was like experiencing these waves of
discourse in what felt like a void.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
It just kind of like blew up within like ten
hours of it posting. I posted it, I noticed that
like a lot of people were like commenting and liking it,
and it was kind of going a little viral, and
like by the next day that I had posted it,
it was just like totally blown up with lots of
(18:56):
like lots of negativity and lots of like hate comments
and people saying all kinds of like crazy stuff about
me and my husband, and that kind of continued. The
negativity kind of continued for a little bit, but it
got to the point by like day like two or
three where like everybody was just coming in on the
(19:16):
post and being like this is actually so cute and
so nice, and like forget about all the haters and
like all of that stuff. And I feel like, I
mean when I try to go into the tweet and
like look for the negativity, I literally can't find negative
comments anymore because there's been so many thousands of people
that have just like drowned all of the like meanness
(19:37):
in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I
kind of think that it like went in this wave
of like negativity, and then there was like another wave
where it was like where it got more popular, but
then it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
She goes on to describe the few days of constant
attention and requests for comment by embracing the Coffee Lady persona,
even briefly adding it to her Twitter bio. And not
everyone would be able to do this, but she takes
it in stride, leaning into jokes that suggest that this
was all some big, evil plan. She tweets things like this,
(20:15):
this was all actually a big plot to draw everybody
in and then teach them about how to grow their
own food and heal the earth plant emoji and general
reflections on the weird, still developing media cycle of those
last few days in October, she directly confronts the criticism
in a gentle series of tweets.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
It's really sad to look at the thousands of hateful
comments on this post, most saying spending time with your
spouse is only for the rich, jobless trust fund kids,
saying our marriage won't last. It really shows why a
lot of marriages probably don't last. It's one thing to
get to spend hours a day with your partner, We
are very blessed, But most of the replies are implying
(20:54):
that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if
they do you must be rich, y'all are truly silly,
but thank you to all the sweet comments. I love
you so much, double heart emoji.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
And to directly address her haters who claimed that she
was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
To answer your questions, we are not rich by any means.
We've worked extremely hard to get to where we're at.
We live very minimally and consciously and work jobs that
match our lifestyle and allow us to live the life
that we do. Thank you for all the love that
uplifting comments. You know who you are red heart emoji.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
Then.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
I think this is a good example of how women
have to conduct themselves very carefully online to not get
anger from people. She's not ignoring it, but if it
does upset her in any way, which it could be
justified to do, she doesn't indicate that publicly. She and
her husband post a number of other pictures in their garden,
(21:52):
which it turns out is where they live in a
community in northern California, where he teaches yoga and she
runs her small esthetician business. They tweeted pictures of them
eating breakfast, drinking the famous coffee, and while they never
dropped their tax returns or the degree of privilege that
they grew up with, the question is, why should they
have to? Because the algorithm said so, There's no way
(22:16):
around it. This story was tailor made for the Internet
rage machine. Box writer Rebecca Jennings referenced as much in
a December twenty twenty two essay called every chronically online
conversation is the same, saying if you felt a creeping
sense of dread while reading about Daisy and her husband
enjoying coffee in their garden, it's possible you spend too
(22:37):
much time online. That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's
post has all the markers of Twitter rage bait, and
by rage bait, I mean a person sharing an experience
that may not be entirely universal. I mostly agree with
this and do feel that the anger towards Daisy is
wildly misplaced. This is the kind of anger we reserve
(23:01):
for Kardashians throwing parties during a pandemic, and this doesn't
invalidate any of the anger or frustration that online users
that were truly sorry triggered by Daisy's inoffensive post. Fault
I mean hell, Daisy herself articulated this feeling better than
anyone else here. She is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
You know, as far as what I could say to
the people that were doing all of that is, I
just think when you're exuding that much hate to other people,
that comes from a place in your heart that's hurt,
because I truly believe that you know everything that like,
we're all just mirrors of each other, and something about
me made them feel something about themselves that was probably
(23:47):
trauma from who knows when in their life, and that
caused something and caused them to feel that way. So
I think that that just comes. That kind of behavior
just comes from someone being hurt. And I understand that,
and I have compascity for those people because truly, maybe
they know better, but they probably don't know any better.
They're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing with
(24:08):
it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
So thankfully Coffee Wife had a mellow enough lifestyle to
forgive and was offline enough to understand the anger without
becoming enraged. Back when it comes to women behaving in
a very particular way to not get a particular reaction.
Daisy did everything right. All she did wrong was exist
(24:33):
in a way that the algorithm was liable to boost.
When I started this show, the person who was most insistent,
along with hundreds of others that I talk about coffee wife,
was my best friend Julia, and I wanted to know why,
because no matter where you fell at the time, what
happened over the coffee in the garden tweet was a
pretty classic public shaming. And Julia is a great comic
(24:55):
and writer who wrote a controversial essay for Gawker in
twenty twenty two called in Defense of Shame. She's literally
an authority on shame, and not just because she grew
up Catholic in New England. But that certainly didn't hurt,
and Julia feels strongly that Daisy was not deserving of
the backlash she got. So when is shame a necessary
(25:16):
tool and when is it? Whatever the fuck this is,
I wanted to ask her about it first.
Speaker 9 (25:22):
I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at
Crooked Media.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
You are the person that I associate most with like
intensely feeling about this story.
Speaker 9 (25:35):
I am the person you most associate with the concept
of shame.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an
interview here by also because yeah, like you felt really
strongly that this woman had been shamed improperly, but you
do feel tell me your feelings about a proper shaming.
Speaker 9 (25:58):
A few years ago, I wrote piece for gaker Rip
called in Defense of Shame. Was kind of immediately criticized
by people who didn't read the piece as a defense
being a defensive shaming. People were basically saying that I
was co signing dog pile culture, co signing shaming, which
(26:20):
is not at all what I was talking about in
the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Uh.
Speaker 9 (26:30):
It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of
a reflective experience, not an external experience. Shame is for
Shame is for me. It's not for you, you know, it's
like so to me. I mean basically, like my my
(26:52):
defense of shame was that more people need to be
kind of in touch with their own shame. And I
honestly think that like a lot of the I think
the fact that a lot of people aren't is the
reason why they end up projecting on other people. But yeah,
this was one of those things like that was a
(27:13):
clear case of shaming in a way that was completely
needless and silly. Honestly, you're yelling at this twenty something
woman because she's having a lovely morning, right, kill yourself.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
Speaker 9 (27:39):
That's a really good question. I think you have to.
I think if there is, you really have to be
punching up. Like the whole thing with Coffee wife is
that she was just some kind of like random lady.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
It's very different if we're all piling on to like
I mean, there are some people who are really impervious
to it. So it like, you know, Elon Musk seems
to just revel in the fact that everyone hates him.
But as far as a productive way to shame, to
shame the average per I mean no, I don't think so,
(28:15):
and I and I really again, I don't advocate for
shame as an external force. I think all of our
shame should be internal, and it should be between us
and the Lord. Your parents are going to be so pleased,
I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish, your impact
(28:36):
has felt on this podcast absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire.
But you can catch every day over at Crooked Media
and we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's
sixteenth minute. Welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had
(29:07):
six cups of coffee and still no husband in sight.
We're talking coffee wife. So not to twenty sixteen ghostbusters
this situation. But take a second to imagine how this
story would be different if it were a husband tweeting
about enjoying time with his wife in said garden. I
really don't think the reaction would be the same. In
the context of hetero couples. Husbands who adore their wives
(29:31):
tend to be lifted up as wife guys in the
same way that they're more easily rewarded socially for being
an active part of their children's lives. And while there's
intersecting issues that caused people to project onto Coffee Wife,
I still think this boiled down to an Internet classic.
Women are fair game for just about anything. There's no
social incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband,
(29:54):
because when a woman adores spending time with her husband,
so what it would be selfish of her and not
love spending time with him when a woman takes good
care of and loves her children, So what, That's the
natural expectation, and coming up short in either department is
still met with easier, more reflexive criticism, even with gains
(30:14):
made in general gender perception.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
But while I do firmly.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Believe that Daisy was dragged online for simply being happy,
I want to state the obvious and say, of course
women can fucking suck online. There's plenty of precedent for that,
because women are people, and there are clear patterns en
mass and as individuals for assists white women specifically like
Daisy and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best,
(30:40):
bigoted and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarchy and capitalism rewards,
and being generally a condescending piece of shit to people
who are more marginalized than themselves. That's a lot of
words to say a no longer trendy term that is
still somewhat useful, and it is girl boss. There's a
bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as
simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who
(31:04):
is ambitious and successful in her career unquote, and others
as I think of the girl boss are connected more
closely to women using the language of feminism to accrue
power while actively upholding the status quo. Probably the most
famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the
best seller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women
(31:24):
to advocate for themselves in the workplace. She is the
ultimate girl boss to me for a few reasons. First
of all, she is a huge beneficiary of capitalism that
is actively harmful. She was the COO of Facebook during
years and years of infinite growth. And second of all,
she's using her position as a powerful woman to sell
(31:46):
you something and not something. Is that the only thing
holding you back as a woman in the workplace is
not the system you find yourself in, but something you
are neglecting to do it self. Helps snake oil that
bullies the women who are reading it.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Here's a quote.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but
this is where we are. If you want the outcome
to be different, you will have to do something about it. Oh,
it's your fault. She also says this, we need to
stop telling women get a mentor and you will excel. Instead,
we need to tell them excel and you will get
a mentor Oh it's my fault, twenty dollars well spent,
(32:27):
thanks Cheryl. That's the kind of girl boss shit we're
talking about. So a very instructive term that is often
misused after being sucked into this linguistic, misogynist vortex. The
difficulty with the girl boss tag gets to why I
think Coffee Wife was done so dirty. There are people
who aren't big fans of women who glommed onto this
(32:50):
word to use it interchangeably with all women or women
who had any power over them at work. If your
manager is a woman, that doesn't mean she is cynically
using tools of the patriarchy to oppress you while assuring
other women they're doing something wrong in order to personally profit.
It's a very specific set of behaviors, and being a
(33:11):
girl boss doesn't mean the women in question haven't experienced
gender discrimination themselves. In fact, I'd wager that all of
them have. This simply does not describe a woo woo
twenty four year old drinking coffee in the garden. The
anger is valid, but it is misplaced. Daisy wasn't trying
to make money by saying this. She wasn't aiming to
(33:33):
change minds or hurt anyone, or, according to her, even
reach outside of her normal audience. She was just sharing
something you know, like we're told is the whole point
of social media, And given the state of Twitter in
the fall of twenty twenty two and on this specific week,
the algorithm pushing this high engagement story makes a lot
(33:56):
of sense. There were a number of algorithmic shifts on
Twitter and in social media writ large in this year.
If you're a Twitter user yourself or I'm not going
to say X, please don't contact me about this. If
you're a Twitter user yourself or a proud Twitter retiree,
you might remember when their timeline became completely algorithmically driven
(34:17):
instead of what it had been for years and years,
which was a real time feed of people you had
chosen to follow. Now, people you didn't follow would be
sorted to the top of your feed if the algorithm
thought you were likely to interact with the post based
on what you'd interacted with in the past, and the
people you actually chose to follow might see their content
get pushed further and further down. Users got really pissed
(34:42):
off about this, and Twitter tried to mitigate the issue
by splitting everything into two feeds, So if you opened
the website on your laptop, it would default the new
shitty algorithm feed and you could shift over to the
timeline you'd had for fifteen years. But it would take
some effort, and it's ghost like daisies that would get
sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed, the one you
(35:06):
didn't ask for and the one that no one is
prepared to be sorted into. And within a week of
the coffee Wi flare up, a looming Twitter acquisition was
finally completed. After months of legal wrangling and negotiation, Elon
Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter. Earlier in
(35:27):
twenty twenty two, Elon Musk, who I think we can
all agree only had the best intentions and deserves the
benefit of the doubt, offered to buy Twitter on a
whim for fifty four dollars and twenty cents a share,
just months after he'd become the company's largest shareholder at
nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal at forty
four billion dollars, and Twitter accepted the offer very quickly.
(35:51):
They genuinely didn't seem to think he'd go through with
it and accepted to all but resist a hostile takeover
from Musk, But Musk, determined to pivot the platform to
white supremacy, doubled down, declaring that his ownership would mean
less bots and more free speech. He certainly made good
on the former in the fascist content is king sense,
(36:13):
but the crackdown on bots is pretty hilarious for a
site that I can't even pay to stop auto posting
my pussy and bio underneath pictures of me and my
infant nephew. So yeah, this change of ownership was famously
a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out of the
objectively bad deal that was his idea in July, but
(36:34):
wasn't able to and was all but forced to go
through with the deal less than a week after. Daisy
was declared the Coffee Wife, and what happened after that
was well, it's why Twitter has been in sharp decline
ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents since
this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones back
(36:58):
to Twitter and generally promoting, challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a
cage match, and tanking the company's net worth by over
fifty percent. There's a very depressing lens that we can
see the coffee wife incident through as this dying gasp
of old school misogyny on Twitter moments before it was
(37:20):
about to get much, much, much worse, and how bad
hasn't gotten on the internet since twenty twenty two. I
went to an expert, my pal Bridget Todd, host of
(37:43):
the Incredible podcast there are No Girls on the Internet.
Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd.
Speaker 11 (37:50):
I am the host and creator of Iheartradios Tech and
culture podcast. There are no girls on the Internet, And
I guess you could say I'm a tech Internet enthusiast, aficionado,
whatever you want to say.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
I'm excited to talk coffee wife with you. Why do
you think that people had such a strong emotional reaction
to coffee Wife.
Speaker 11 (38:11):
Well, one, I think it's absolutely algorithmic, right. I think
that we know a lot about how algorithms work. I
think that they absolutely are feeding us and pushing us
content that is going to elicit strong reactions, emotional reactions
from us. So even if you don't know this woman,
don't follow this woman. She wasn't like somebody who had
a ton of followers. She had a relatively small account.
(38:32):
Platforms know this is content that it's eliciting strong reaction,
strong engagement. Let's make sure that more people see it,
you know, that's the name of the game for platforms. However,
I do think that the timeframe kind of matters, Like
I think that this was a time where do you
remember how in the very beginning of the pandemic we
(38:53):
were Also there was a sort of novelty to it
where it was like, who knows what's happening? But then
that kind of were off, and then it was like, well,
I guess this is just all of our lives now.
And I think that this happened at a time when
a lot of people were just sort of grappling with that.
I think for me personally, it was a time where
I was spending way more time than I should have
been on screens on the internet, really paying a lot
(39:15):
of attention to what strangers on the Internet were doing,
because I didn't have a lot going on outside of that, right,
I wasn't going out the way I used to all
of that, And I also think we were all feeling
the sort of like existential dread of how reality feels
right now. Right, everything is expensive, Rents are rising, Inflation
is terrible. It just feels like we are being squeezed
(39:36):
from so many different ankles.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
And so when somebody comes along.
Speaker 11 (39:40):
With just pure the pure joy of a you know,
having coffee in their garden with their husband every morning,
and you know, isn't this nice, it's like a trigger
that It's not surprising to me that it was this
big tension point for so many people.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've
been having, I'd be curious what you think about that,
Like how the pandemic sort of warped our relationship to
the internet and what it looks like trying to sort
of return to straddling real life and internet life.
Speaker 11 (40:12):
Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you
on that.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
I mean, I can speak for myself.
Speaker 11 (40:20):
I am not proud of what the pandemic, how I
responded to the pandemic socially, right, I also am a
pretty socially anxious person. I'm somebody who's in my head
a lot, and I'm not proud to say this, but
I would bet that I'm not the only person who
feels this way. I think during the pandemic. You know,
we were watching people die, we were watching people lose
(40:41):
loved ones, we were watching people lose their livelihoods. It
was a really tough time, and so it was hard
for me as somebody who luckily was very privileged, and
that that wasn't the case for me, right, Like I
got COVID. People I know got COVID, but thankfully I
didn't lose my loved ones.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
It wasn't impacting me the way that it was.
Speaker 11 (40:59):
I'm not an essential right, and so I think that
for me personally, it was strange to deep to grapple
with that, this feeling of like I am going through
a tough time and so is everyone. I think it
for me created this dynamic where I hate to say it,
but I was very much like what about my pain?
(41:20):
You know, Like why is like when is it going
to be my turn for somebody to see me? Like
I wasn't an essential worker. Nobody around me died, but
I still had a tough time. I was finding myself
in this like almost very narcissistic place of wanting somebody
to acknowledge what I had been through. And so I
think with Coffee Lady, I think it was a lot
(41:40):
of people who perhaps were wanting someone to see their pain,
wanting others to acknowledge their pain and their anxiety and
their loneliness and their frustration, which is something that I
can relate to really deeply, and so I think that's
part of why, because some of the replies that she
got would be like, I can't afford it, Garden, I
(42:00):
don't have a husband. You know, I'm alone here, I
don't have any friends, Like people really making it about
themselves and what they lack, and like something about that
tweet I think highlighted the lack that a lot of
people were feeling. And I just I really, it's easy
to dunk on these people and be like, Wow, you're
so dysregulated that that's that this woman, this random woman's
(42:22):
tweet is making you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
But I also kind of get it.
Speaker 9 (42:25):
You're totally right.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
And I know I've been guilty of this in the
past and probably during the pandemic era Internet, where you're
taking like your personal pain and I've had moments where
I'm like, I don't want to see someone happy right
now because I'm not, And like, I think that there's
a lot of that, but some of it is sort
of manifesting as a political statement. I can't quite get
(42:46):
my head around that phenomenon because I don't want to
discount the fact that like class rage and class anxiety online.
I mean, it makes total sense. I experienced it a lot,
especially it's sort of the further back you go, but
she's so clearly not the person that can. I think
it's interesting online when people dogpile on someone who cannot
(43:10):
help them, right.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
I do think there's a gendered aspect to it.
Speaker 11 (43:15):
I haven't really kind of grappled with this too much
just yet, but like I know, for me, when I'm
scrolling TikTok or Instagram, there is something about the visualization
of a woman who seems like she's got her shit together,
she's got it all figured out. She wears the perfect
two piece you know, workout set, she eats right, she
starts her day with like lemon water or macha instead
(43:37):
of coffee.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
It is three gorgeous children who are wealthy act yeah.
Speaker 11 (43:42):
Exactly, And so I think that coffee ladies tweet, at
least for me, triggered a kind of very gendered, almost
like politicized anxiety that there are women out there who
are doing it right and bridget you are doing it wrong,
like something about like like there has never been a
day where I'm able to start my day.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
Speaker 11 (44:06):
I actually do have a small garden, and I never
start my day out there because I start my day
like most people, like frazzled late for a call, just
trying to chug some coffee while I'm getting dressed, like
doing a million other things. Sure I shouldn't be taking
a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
But who does that right?
Speaker 11 (44:27):
And so I think there is something where women are
told that you have to in order to sort of
signal that you have it together, your mornings have to
look like X Y Z. And I think that something
about coffee Lady, something about that tweet signaled to women
like I've got it all together? Do you feel like
craft that you don't. I don't think she was. I
(44:47):
certainly don't think she was trying to do that. But
that's I think that's probably how it hit some of us.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
The Internet, I think, like a lot of things, is
sort of built to make women angry at each other. Yes,
and present each other and yeah, I mean, could you
speak to that a little bit? I know that that's
your beat.
Speaker 11 (45:04):
Yes, I mean, it's just a document, a well documented fact.
Algorithms want women to feel like shit. They want women
to be comparing themselves to other women, they want women
to be feeling bad. They want women to be feeling
like crap all the time. And algorithms and platforms and
tech leaders make money off of women feeling like shit
(45:24):
about themselves.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
That's just a fact, right.
Speaker 11 (45:26):
And so if you've ever been scrolling Instagram or TikTok
or whatever and you keep being surfaced content that makes
you feel like crap, that's not you. You're not crazy
or sensitive. Algorithms and platforms do that with intention because
it keeps you on the platform longer, it keeps you
coming back, and it makes them money. It is a
very twisted dynamic that we are a cog in this
(45:48):
cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off
of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Being in competition with each other.
Speaker 11 (45:57):
And rather than like celebrating the ways that we are different,
celebrating the ways in which like, oh, well, like my
brand is this, I'm a hot mess, I own it.
Speaker 3 (46:05):
Whatever.
Speaker 11 (46:05):
Whatever algorithms trick us into thinking that all of these
great things that make us who we are are actually foibles,
are actually bad And yeah, I mean there's been study
after study that shows that the more time you spend
on particularly Instagram, the more young women feel bad about themselves,
the more body anxiety they have, the more likely they
are to engage in things like food issues or disordered eating.
(46:28):
And none of that is by mistake and it's all
by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
And that and that would also apply to Coffee Life.
That people were attacking her as if she was like
the root cause of it. It was very strange. I
forget who I was talking to the other day about
how they felt like they had fucked up their algorithm
because they said that they weren't interested in something and
the algorithm kept serving that to them because they cared
(46:56):
enough to say I'm not interested. And the only way
to true, truly demonstrate you're not interested is to keep
scrolling and don't stop. But like if you are, if
you theoretically you know, see like a coffee wife, TikTok
come up and you care enough to say I don't
like this, the algorithm will serve it to you again.
(47:17):
And so I ran an experiment and it's completely true,
like that the kind of content I went out of
my way to say I don't like this. The algorithm
responds by being like, well, maybe you'll interact with it
negatively because it makes you feel bad.
Speaker 11 (47:31):
Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
I completely agree with you.
Speaker 11 (47:37):
And imagine how harmful that is when it's content that
you find triggering. Right, when it's content that you have
identified like that might not be safe or healthy for
me to see and engage with. Right if the algorithm
has has gleaned like, oh, she has a little bit
of an issue with X y Z. Let's keep showing
it to her and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Yeah, really, that cool.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
The part that's hard is even when I'm looking for it,
it's hard to escape the like emotional experience of I
don't want to see that, and like feeling that your
anger for whatever reason does seem to it routes at
the person because you can't you know the real kind
of Yeah, this sounds conspiratorial, but like the real enemy
(48:19):
has no face right, And so I feel like there
is this sort of very human instinct to try to
place a face and a name to what is bothering you,
when in reality it is something much larger, like you know,
social media algorithms that are trying to make you upset,
like the concept of class and like these huge things.
(48:43):
And it's finding a sort of villain of the day
to take it out on, even when that person sucks.
In this case, they didn't, but sometimes they do, but
it still doesn't it's so unproductive.
Speaker 11 (48:55):
Yeah, we are making a bunch of random people proxies
for a lot of our very valid anger and pain
and fear. That's why I always say, like, we're it's
a game and we're all being played. The only winner
here are tech platforms and people who run them and
people who make money from them. And so even if
you are running a successful little grift for a while,
(49:15):
engagement mating and all of that, all it takes is
one algorithmic tweak and then no one's You don't have
the eyeballs or the attention of the world any longer.
And so, yeah, it's it's a game, and we're all
being played.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Speaker 11 (49:35):
Something that I found really interesting about the Coffee Wife
saga was how everybody assumed she was wealthy because she
has a garden. And I found that to be really
interesting because she was like, Oh, it's not like a
fancy garden, it's just a small garden in my like
regular home.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
I think that it.
Speaker 11 (49:53):
Is very easy and I say this because I've done
it to trick yourself into thinking, like, the things that
I want I can't have. I am, I am, I
could never have a garden. And I think that that
really the Coffee Wife thing really showed me that a
lot of us feel like we can't have things that
we actually can have. I don't know if that makes sense,
(50:16):
but the fact that so many people were like, well,
you have to be rich to have a garden, and
it's like, well, actually, I don't think that's the case,
and people who are not rich have gardens all the time,
And like, why are you assuming that the pastime of
gardening is something that only the wealthy can do. Even
if you live in a small apartment, you can still
have like a window garden or something. I think that
I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the
things that we want we cannot have.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
So that's one two.
Speaker 11 (50:39):
I would say, yeah, we really have to be better
at understanding where we put our pain and who we
make the proxies for our pain. I would say, if
the person you are tweeting at cannot change the circumstances
that you're upset about, maybe you're putting your rage and
your anger and your emotionality in the wrong place, and
(51:01):
that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality
to the right places.
Speaker 7 (51:05):
Right.
Speaker 11 (51:06):
I know those places tend to be structural and institutional
and faithless, but we gotta really have a sense of
what forces are actually making us unhappy, and it's probably
not this lady drinking coffee in her garden.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Thank you so much to bridget Todd. Listen to there
are no girls on the internet every single week, I
sure do. So what became of our coffee wife legend?
Daisy didn't respond to my request for an interview, and
I respect that she just wants to be a person
who does pleasant things with people she likes. Some people
(51:41):
just don't want a dumb bitch podcaster interfering with their life,
and I have to accept that as far as her
online persona, Daisy is no longer Coffee Wife. She is
Daisy and appears to be spending her time generally not
on Twitter nowadays. She lives in Bali, India, and is
returning to her lashes business later in the year. I
(52:03):
have no idea if she's a wife, if she drinks coffee,
but she's certainly Daisy, and I like Daisy, and with
that the coffee wife. Your sixteenth minute ends. Now, Okay,
I'm on the couch with my boyfriend drinking coffee. Close enough.
Speaker 5 (52:27):
Oh I should I guess it?
Speaker 6 (52:28):
Should hold I should hold it.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
You're right, get your coffee.
Speaker 5 (52:30):
Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've
gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
Speaker 9 (52:38):
And we don't have a garden. We do have a.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Little deck, but I just kind of we have.
Speaker 5 (52:45):
A bug in the house though, Casper, Casper, two.
Speaker 9 (52:49):
Bugs, we do, two bugs.
Speaker 8 (52:51):
I just the deck kind of stresses me out because
there's so much pollution. Who we're across the street from
a We shouldn't say where we.
Speaker 5 (52:58):
Are, No, we should, but you can visualize the pollution
because we can see.
Speaker 4 (53:02):
All of the gathering dust.
Speaker 5 (53:03):
Just so much dust the accumulated ducks.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
Speaker 5 (53:08):
They are, they're kissing right now, and there's looking Casper's forehead.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're
the same size.
Speaker 10 (53:17):
Now.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
It's great.
Speaker 5 (53:20):
We could try this in a garden at some point though,
don't you think.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to
Grant Creator and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet
(53:51):
shout outs to our dog producer Anderson my cat's fleeing
Casper and by pet Rothbert who will outload us all.
Bye b
Host
Jamie Loftus
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