CZM Rewind: the dress

Hello Sixteenth Minute heads!

We'll be back next week with a brand new interview with the guy from the ~*sHe cAmE dOwN iN a bUbBlE bRo*~ video, but this week we are re-airing our episode on the 2015 phenomenon of The Dress.

Tickets to Jamie's show 11/29 in LA: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-tiny-man-is-trying-to-kill-me-tickets-1089424250259?aff=oddtdtcreator

Donate to the Native Women's Collective: https://www.nativewomenscollective.org/

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

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

Original Air Date: 5.21.24

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coolso Media. Hi everyone, Jamie here. We're taking a week
off at cool Zone for the holiday, So this week
is going to be a rerun one of the very
early episodes of sixteenth Minute on the Dress. I just
wanted to say a few things at the top. We
will be back next week with I'm thrilled to report
because I just did the interview on an interview with

(00:23):
the guy from the Wicked Witch of the West, she
came down in a bubble Bro video Matt Pacerro. That'll
be out next week, followed by our three part series
on the Mani Sphere. Thank you so much to everyone
who reached out to everyone in the LA area who
has been kind enough to come out to my solo show.
There is a bonus show that has been announced that

(00:43):
will be happening on November twenty ninth at the Lyric
Hyperion Theater. We're going to be doing one extra workshop
of the show. So if you weren't able to get
tickets because all the other shows sold out, feel free
to come out this week. Feel free to come out
on Friday to the show. That's November twenty ninths. And finally,

(01:04):
because Thanksgiving, as I hope you know is a crock
of shit. I wanted to encourage everyone in joining me
this week in donating and contributing to the Native Women's
collective and nonprofit that nurtures the health and safety of
Native women in the US. So if you're interested, the
link is below, and with that, please enjoy this re

(01:26):
release of our episode on the Dress. See you next week. Clickbait.
If I had to define it, clickbait is a combination
of fake news and a freak show. It was a
sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in the
Western world and an early symptom of where American journalism
finds itself. As I record this, major newsrooms are shuttering

(01:49):
or vastly reduced during an election year, and most major
newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting in
the remaining papers running on people pleasing fumes, setting cocourage
their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity.
Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad,
which is something people in the present always say. Ten

(02:11):
years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days
of twenty twenty four as we enlist our third gradiers
in the Water Wars but for now it's true. The
clickbait culture of the mid twenty tens was alarming, it
worse annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in
quite the same way. The word clickbait was a runner
up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in

(02:32):
twenty fourteen, tied with normcore and man's plain. And if
there's a more twenty fourteen sentence than that, I am
not aware of it. Here are some major headlines you
could find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails?
We have some guesses. The gritty Power Rangers reboot with
James Vanderbeek is the stuff of nightmares. Thirteen unconventional things

(02:54):
to do with your Gallantine this year you know garbage
and can say I'm being mean because these are headlines
I wrote. Come with me if you dare to. Twenty
fifteen The Big Short Steve Jobs, the movie the Boring One,
not the hilarious Ashton Kutcher one, fifty Shades of Gray.

(03:17):
We're at peak, justin Bieber peak, Fettiwop, the year of
hotline bling and Hamilton. Obama is rounding out his second term.
It's the year he allows an airstrike on a children's
hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across the
US this June, and ten days after that, a dumb
bitch named Donald Trump will go down and escalator in

(03:39):
New York and announce he's wonning for president. I have
managed to graduate from college as semester early, and in
fighting for my life at my first proper writing job
at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become relevant
to this story, is writing click bait. Or that's not
totally right, because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe building.

(04:01):
I ate my grilled Jesus among them, but very rarely
was I writing actual news. For the most part, I
was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required
original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and
was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed.

(04:22):
Boston dot Com was the Globe's hyperlocal sister site, and
a now defunct vertical called Bdcwire was their clickbait site.
I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating
the site with stories as if there were ten writers,
and in twenty fifteen I worked two full time jobs,
first at this now defunct website as well as co

(04:45):
managing a now defunct improv theater and Cards on the Table.
I was fired from The Globe not six months later
for refusing to take down a tweet about comm I
don't know, you're only twenty two months. I'm getting distracted.
Early twenty fifteen, I did. We'd get to do some
original reporting here and there, but my main gig was
sourcing viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that

(05:09):
sites like these would adorably and deceptively call hat tips.
And I'd love to tell you what more of these
stories were, but as any journalist who started working in
the age of the Internet knows, almost none of it
is available now without the assistance of the Internet Archive.
BDC Wire is gone, along with those articles I wrote,

(05:29):
like ten reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the
one reason not to end at all, or whatever I
was reading on today's Internet, Bdcwire never existed, So just
a reminder you are listening to a future piece of
lost media. But in the mid twenty tens, a lot
of writers got their start the same way I did

(05:50):
at this time, including probably writers you like now, from
young gen xers to elderly zoomers. We were tasked with
regurgitating stories that social media cared about and regurgitating them
to make them seem like actual news. We weren't making
shit up like tabloids, but there was a sense that
one writer was vomiting into another writer's mouth, and so

(06:11):
on and so on to maximize site traffic and profit.
We the writers never got paid equitably, but for places
like The Boston Globe and other major news organizations who
were hemorrhaging money due to the inability to adapt to
the Internet when the moment counted, these clickbait sister sites
became a temporary attempt at increasing cash flow, or, as

(06:34):
I knew it, tricking a group of twenty two year
olds into thinking they were real writers in exchange for
bad pay and a content mentality. So basically, I was
working for a regional ripoff of early BuzzFeed. And to
be clear, I am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with
BuzzFeed News, which is a Pulitzer winning and recently tragically

(06:55):
shuttered news division. Nor am I saying that working at
a BuzzFeed content mill was bad or even uncreative. I mean,
I think that my BBC wire magnum opus. I saw
Shrek the Musical five times colon. This is my story
fucking ripped, not that you can read it anywhere. What's
interesting is that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed

(07:21):
combing the Internet to fill their website full of clickable,
eccentric hashtag content, often legitimize Internet characters of the day
as legitimate news figures, and this was never more true
than in the mid twenty tents. A quick brief on BuzzFeed.
At this time, the company had been around since two

(07:41):
thousand and six, and its legitimate news arm, BuzzFeed News,
wouldn't be launched until a year later in twenty sixteen.
Founder Jonah Peretti had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from
the start. In a twenty thirteen profile of Paretti in
New York Magazine, early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's quote
out algorithm to call stories from around the web that

(08:02):
were showing stirring the virality. In return for functioning as
a sort of early warning system, BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites
to install programming code that allowed the company to monitor
their traffic. Like a lot of social media we discussed today.
Peretti's original project begun while he was working at the

(08:22):
similarly click minded Huffington Post, was collecting a shitload of
data at best. He wanted to know what people were
interested in. If I'm being cynical, he wanted to sell
it back to us in an easy to consume package,
and we were happy to do it. By twenty fifteen,
BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating original content in

(08:45):
addition to their bread and Butter, which was both curating
and rephrasing viral stories from other corners of the Internet
to drive traffic, and one thousand different quizzes on which
ice cream flavor you were based on your mental illness
diagnosis something like that took them all, no judgment, min
chocolate chip, OCD, bipolar whatever. Much of early BuzzFeed was

(09:07):
extremely goofy and what I think is now sort of
associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing, but there was
no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brentson produced a lot
of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed, and many people
in their writing and performance stable ended up bailing on
BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill workers and not

(09:28):
artists think comedians and writers like Gabe Dunn and Alison
Raskin think. Super successful YouTubers like Sophia and Nigard think
whether you love them or you hate them for cheating
on their wives, the try guys, But regardless of the
level of talent, there's no point in denying it. A
lot of early BuzzFeed was rehashed stuff, either sent in

(09:49):
by users or gently lifted by a fleet of young,
aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a sticky story that
someone else had posted online for free all ready. The
goal show it to a wider audience with some light
commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed and
one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character cosigns in its history

(10:13):
came on February twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, a day that
launched two huge viral stories. One was about a pair
of lamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
In Sun City. Today, this may have been the very
definition of the Wild West. A slow, sometimes high speed
pursuit of two lamas on the loose, breaking away from
their owners, at times from each other, seizing their moment
and their shot at freedom, And.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
The other one is one whose impact is still almost
bafflingly still enduring today.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
The dress.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Your sixteenth minute starts now sixty.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
Six.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
The dress. It's a potent and memorable piece of Internet lore.
One where your perception mattered was this dress, which was
first posted by Scottish mother of the bride, Cecilia Bleestale,
in this weird, blown out photo from a designer outlet
in England. Was this dress blue and black? Or was
it white and gold? It was blue and black, And

(12:01):
I knew that right away, because I'm perfect and I've
never made a mistake. And even though it sounds old timey,
I mean, after all, we're talking about an optical illusion
that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera. It's kind
of hard to overstate what a sensation the dress became.
I remember this day so clearly because this story broke
my second week working as a professional writer and as

(12:23):
a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait. It
was like a gorgeous gift had descended from space. As
I was reflecting, I wanted to make sure I wasn't
fluffing the memory in my mind, so I reached out
to my buddy Kevin Slain, who was one of the
other three writers working overtime to create hashtag content on
BDC Wire to be read by hashtag nobody for hashtag

(12:44):
seventy hours a week, and he remembered this day really
clearly too.

Speaker 4 (12:49):
My name is Kevin Slain, and I am a staff
writer at The Boston Globe covering entertainment and culture and
what's up? Not much, Jamie, how are you?

Speaker 5 (13:03):
I am good after all these years.

Speaker 4 (13:06):
I'm good, real throwback talking to you today about this day.

Speaker 5 (13:11):
About I know about this historic day that is over
nine years ago now, which feels not great, Okay. So
I just wanted to go because I feel like I
was writing out like how I imagine this day. I
think it was like, certainly in my first month working
at BDC wire, do you remember the dress day in

(13:32):
our little corner?

Speaker 4 (13:34):
So I remember what I did that day, and at
least in my case, we're talking about Thursday, which was
kind of like the dress dropped at night, you know.
It was the wave the day went for me was
I was at work. I wrote a story about the Lamas,
which was the big I remember Idi, a predecessor to

(13:55):
the dress I dreamed some lamas.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
I can't find it on the way back, miss, but
I was like, okay, okay, Lama's first Lamas are the story.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
I had to go back through my Twitter archive and
I found that I tweeted out the story that I
wrote about the lamas. Thank GOHI was just you know,
our house style at the time, lots of gifts, lots
of old text, just you know, us trying to be BuzzFeed.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
I guess, yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
But anyway, so I did that, and then a bunch
of us went to a happy hour at the Banshee,
which was just where a lot of us went after work,
and I proceeded to get really drunk and sing a
lot of karaoke, and at some point someone pulled out
their phone and started showing it to everyone, being like,
check this out. This dress thing is crazy. And I

(14:47):
reacted to it the way that I think I did
to a lot of that stuff for the time, because
this was like our first media job. And I just
felt simultaneously like enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed,
and I felt, you know, probably undeservedly above it all.
And so the thing was that back then they really

(15:08):
had like a flat hierarchy in terms of like who
could say what, and everyone would just send all staff
emails all the time. And I remember pulling out my
phone and looking and seeing that our old homepage had
like three stories on the dress right on the top,
and there was like an active email chain going on
about this, and me, very drunk, just was like, this

(15:32):
is ridiculous. I can't believe we have three stories on
the dress on the homepage. And whoever did that got like,
you know, offended that I said that rightfully.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
So well, I mean that's a lot. I didn't remember
there being three stories. But that also makes sense because
there were like three different verticals sort of all like
going to the same place, and we were all trying
to get clicks on the same thing that we were
all sort of ripping off.

Speaker 5 (15:58):
For a BuzzFeed. It was just like weird. It was
a weird time, It really was.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
And I even went and then looked at the like
the next day I looked in the wayback machine. It
was even more of that. It was like the night
producer who wrote like a short little thing, and then
our old boss who I won't name, wrote this like
very ridiculous in his own voice style post, and then
someone else wrote like their take on the dress, and

(16:24):
then another of our old bosses then asked John Henry
to weigh in about the dress. And there's a video
I can't find of him talking about the dress, which
I wish I could find, because I think that.

Speaker 5 (16:34):
What I wish we had the John Henry futage.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
That's uninged, right, like, who needed that?

Speaker 5 (16:41):
Well, thank you, thank you for reminiscing with me. This
was beautiful.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
Yes, it's weird to think about now, and I know
it's objectively not true. It was a totally different time
and you can't help but look back at it fondly,
despite the fact that I was hating myself through the
entire portion of it.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Thanks so much to Kevin, who is a real writer
for the Boston Globe and has been for years. So
this day was genuinely a huge day for news on
and about the Internet. The FCC had just voted to

(17:22):
classify Internet service providers as public utilities, effectively creating net neutrality,
but the dress was indisputably the main character. Here's the
cliff notes of what happened in February twenty fifteen. A
Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding and the bride's
mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she
was considering wearing the dress. It's not a great picture,

(17:45):
but it is a very mid twenty ten's mother of
the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some
color blocking, unnecessary lace elements. But the color that was
the question. The bride, Grace posted the photo of the
dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom
assured her that the dress was blue with black lace,
but Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace,

(18:08):
so she posted the question to her Facebook so her
friends could weigh in, and a week long debate was sparked.
So the dress first became a main character in her
small community in colin Say, Scotland. Then the wedding happened
and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic
of discussion at the wedding too, and it's actually members
of the wedding band that take the dress from a

(18:29):
local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlyn McNeil,
who was a close friend of the couples, said of
the dress, iurl we forgot about it until we saw
it at the wedding which the mother of the bride
was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black. In
any other timeline, this would be a footnote that Grace's
mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill

(18:49):
a decade later. But this was a time on the
Internet where viral stories were social currency, and Katelyn McNeil
had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was
her who ended up posing what would become the viral
seed that would take this story global. On her tumbler,
the post attached to a picture of the dress said, guys,
please help me. Is this dress white or gold or

(19:11):
blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and
we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this.
It got about five thousand notes, and if you aren't
tumbler literate, that was a lot of interaction on the
platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in,
As the legend goes BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running
the BuzzFeed tumbler at that time and was tasked with

(19:33):
what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular
garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content theft.
Katelyn McNeil was writing so high on the dress fumes
that she sent Holderness her post saying, BuzzFeed, please help.
I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last
post on my tumbler, okay, and some people see it

(19:53):
blue and some people see it white. Can you explain
because we are going crazy? Holderness replied, holy crap, it's
blue and black. I don't understand. I made a poll,
and she links to what she posted off of Caitlin
McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening.
As Kevin correctly recalled, the post was simply titled what

(20:14):
color is this dress? There was a poll to vote
black and blue or white and gold. The post started
doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed
at that time did. It was after folks left for
work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an
overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning,

(20:35):
Holderness's post had reached eight hundred and forty thousand views
per minute. At its peak, it had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record,
becoming its most successful post of all time, and once
the BuzzFeed post took off. The dress became a popular
subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at
the time, but Twitter tends to be the thing that

(20:56):
people still talk about these days. Facebook is for moms
and creepy cousins, but in twenty fifteen, it was Twitter
where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in
like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right
before celebrities all realized in Unison that they needed their
own social media managers, and so you could be pretty

(21:17):
sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
And for everyone asking, I see blue and black.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
And it was the real Taylor Swift when she said,
I don't understand this odd dress debate, and I feel
like it's a trick somehow. I'm confused and scared. Ps
it's obviously blue and black, or Mindy kaaling with one
of the most twenty fifteen tweets of all time, the
dress is worse than the Sony hack to me, Beyonce
said nothing. This is all a little pedestrian For Beyonce,

(21:46):
BuzzFeed was at the top of their game, and so
of course made more content about the dress. Twenty four
hours after the first post about the dress went live
on the site, nine out of ten trending BuzzFeed posts
were about the same dress. They were fucking relentless. Why
are people seeing different colors in that damn dress? The
dress is blue and black, says the person who saw

(22:08):
it in person. This second photo of the dress definitely
proves that the dress is blue and black. What the
dress color you see says about you? And the one
post that wasn't about the dress, here's the first picture
of Eddie Redmain as transgender painter Lily elba Oh twenty fifteen.
And don't forget at this time, BuzzFeed's video vertical was

(22:29):
also really popular on YouTube, and that was also going
nuts with traffic from the dress.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
You are seen white and gold.

Speaker 4 (22:36):
Where are you looking at?

Speaker 1 (22:40):
No, you're kidding, you heard correctly, that's Quinta Brunson. I
just think that's really funny. So, yes, the dress is
a goofy sensation, and it even trickles down to lowly
worm regional BuzzFeed ripoff writer Jamie Loftus. But keep in
mind BuzzFeed is a business, and people with any monetary
stock in BuzzFeed were doing donuts in their Mercedes about

(23:02):
this fucking story. There was even this bizarre essay by
then editor in chief Ben Smith, saying that the dress
phenomenon was this sign of BuzzFeed's power.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
He said, the explosion of Kate's holderness is post about
the dress White and Gold, by the way, is a
reminder that while we now do so many more things,
we've never moved away from our roots. Hindeed, we launched
the acute or Not app yesterday.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Sir, your underpaid employee reblogged a Tumblr post, but by
all means keep talking. This post in particular is so
weird to reflect on now. It sounds so certain that
BuzzFeed will be the vanguard of what makes something special
on the Internet, and that a post like the dress
is all a part of the game of five D
chess that BuzzFeed is playing, and that they're the reason

(23:48):
that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested most
of all in what a story does, not just in
how many people read it, but in what effect it
has on their lives and on the world. Kate's post
delighted people and connected them to steal an idea from
z Frank, Its power was less in the encapsulated item
itself than in the network around it. That's true of

(24:10):
a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a recipe
or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions and
millions of impressions from this story, one that Kaitlyn McNeil
literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps the
profits from the engagement. At a time where impressions were
what defined your success and your advertising profits, as is

(24:31):
so common in these stories, it was like everyone was
benefiting from the dress story, except, of course, anyone involved
in the actual story. It didn't take long for completely
unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress. To capitalize
on the trend, Pizza Hut posts a picture of a
shitty pizza with the caption It's white and gold. Two
newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit The

(24:53):
original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells out immediately.
Brandon Silverman, the the former CEO of social media monitoring
site crowd Tangled, said this when asked about the range
of institutions that wanted in on this story. This is
from a twenty sixteen retrospective on the Day of the
Lama and the Dress from twenty sixteen, written for where

(25:16):
Else BuzzFeed, Silverman says.

Speaker 6 (25:19):
This, We've seen other stories go viral, but the sheer
diversity of outlets that picked it up and we're talking
about it was unlike anything we had ever seen. Everyone
from QVC to Warnerbros. To local public libraries to Red
Cross affiliates were all posting links to it on their
social accounts. That kind of diversity and who's sharing story
pretty much never happens, and certainly never to that degree.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
And of course, no Internet main character would be complete
without the backlash, which, in the case of the Dress
came in the form of people bemoaning that this story
had overshadowed more important news from the same day. And
even this mentality feels a little bit dated now. Yes,
it's important to discuss the other new news of the day,
but favoring something goofy and meaningless over hard news wasn't

(26:04):
something that started in twenty fifteen. Although that said, I
do think there's a case for saying that the success
of posts like the Dress tells people in tech developing
social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories
are distracting for people, leading to an era of the
algorithm favoring engagement driven posts over carefully reported news. To

(26:25):
talk about what made the dress special in terms of
what it said about where social media was picking its
main characters at this time, I turned to a writer
who has spent her career writing about the Internet, often
meaning the Internet turns on her. Taylor Lorenz released her
book Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and
Power on the Internet last year, taking a look at

(26:46):
the short and eventful history of online influencers, including a
fair number of characters of the day, and yes, the
dress herself. We caught up on Zoom about this very
particular moment in Internet history.

Speaker 7 (26:58):
I'm Taylor Lorenz and I'm the author of Extremely Online,
The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
This has been your beat for some time. How did
you become the person to talk to about the Internet.

Speaker 7 (27:11):
Yeah, well, I'm like peak millennial. I graduated directly into
the procession the two thousand and eight financial crisis, and
I had had like random internships in college and summer jobs,
but I didn't really know what I was doing, and
so I was working retail food service. I worked for
a messenger company, I was babysitting, was I worked at
a call center for a while. I was just kind

(27:34):
of making money and I discovered Tumblr, which back in
two thousand and nine was ascended as a social platform,
and that was kind of my gateway into blogging, and
I just started blogging about stuff. At the time, I
was really against the mainstream media because they were writing
really stupid things about tech and millennials and it was

(27:55):
making me mad, and so I would just go on
my blogs and ran about whatever I felt like ranting about.
I was really inspired by this woman, Katie Natopoulos, who yes,
she was blogging back then too, and she had this website.
She had all these funny like blogs and sites, and
she seemed to be like the only person that I

(28:15):
thought was. She was like a couple years older than
me and seemed really cool, and I just thought, I'm
going to try to write about the Internet, but like
from the perspective of somebody that actually uses it.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
There are stories that feel or my feeling at first
was it feels very connected to a certain type of
platform or like a certain era in social media. When
I was reading extremely online, I was like, oh, right,
the dress was kind of this cross platform success story.

(28:45):
Could you impact that a little for me of like
how the original story and then BuzzFeed kind of had
a mutual role in this story success. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (28:56):
Well, just to kind of like explain the landscape throughout
the early to mid twenty tens, you had this explosion
of digital media sites spurred by VC funding, you know, BuzzFeed,
Mike dot Com, Race to Work, Mashable, Like, there were
all these like digital media sites, and the primary way
that they were gaining traffic was going into sort of

(29:17):
what were then the depths of the Internet, mostly Tumblr
and Reddit, getting the most viral content off those platforms
and repackaging it on the website. Because that was an
era when not a lot of people were going and
spending a lot of time and getting their news and
information and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't
as widely adopted. People didn't know how to navigate the
Internet yet, so Buzzheed would just sort of like mine

(29:40):
this content. Kates was working at BuzzFeed at the time,
found a Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow,
this is kind of crazy. It was getting a little
bit of traction on Tumblr, and she thought, let me
post it on the BuzzFeed website, because that's kind of
again the business model at the time was finding what
did while on Tumblr and then bringing it to this
wider audience, the BuzzFeed, And of course she publishes it

(30:02):
on BuzzFeed and it just goes insane.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
A bunch of other.

Speaker 7 (30:06):
Places immediately published their own versions of that story, but
BuzzFeed got like all the upside kind of from it,
Like they got all the traffic they were able to
monetize through ads on that article page. Like right, nobody
was picking through as much to the original Tumblr that day.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
I was cruising the wayback machine and I was like,
this is what I think of as like peak BuzzFeed.
How did they get there? Like what made BuzzFeed special
or early to this kind of content mining.

Speaker 7 (30:40):
BuzzFeed was one of the first true sort of like
digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea
in the two thousands. It's really spurred by the rise
of blogging, that you could build digital media platforms and
capture digital media ad dollars. There's all this money moving
from traditional advertise to digital advertising. The traditional advertising had

(31:03):
been with newspapers and traditional media, and so the thinking
was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are
going to go to the digital version of the news
media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was
this website like vox and you know, other sites were
sort of created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that

(31:24):
didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook
and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of
digital media companies died pretty much or like as a
shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing.
Traffic was so important because the more views you got,
the more digital like display ads you know we're seeing,
the more money the platform would make. And this is

(31:44):
when a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts.
They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot
of multimedia because the Internet speeds weren't there yet, so
it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load.
Instagram was barely had video at that time, so links
were really kaying and if you could create a very
shareable link, you could get tons of traffic. Therefore the

(32:06):
company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just
expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that Internet
users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit.
You have to remember this was pre algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic
feeds were not really a thing back then. I think
Twitter only rolled out their algorithmicfeed in twenty sixteen twenty fifteen.
It was really like the Internet was very manual, and

(32:29):
so if people went on a platform, they couldn't especially
Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological, right, so
if you went on the platform, it was hard to
kind of find the most interesting viral content. So you
relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into these
platforms scrape out the most engaging content and presented to

(32:49):
you all in one place. On this case too, I
think it's really interesting that the dress post it was
posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan tumbler
for this girl, Sarah White show White ChIL. I always
mispronounce her name, even though yes Lovely who was like
a YouTuber manager. So it was just like the chances
of somebody finding that Normally, yes, it was getting reblogged

(33:11):
on Tumblr, but BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Basically Thanks so much to Taylor, and check out Extremely
Online in stores now, and we'll be right back with
another interview about why the success of the dress marked
the beginning of the end for dumb fun on the internet.

(33:37):
Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I am the author of
the twenty fifteen post was SNL's isis sketch too offensive?
As fascinated as I am about how the dress went
viral and what now feels like an almost old fashioned way,
I wanted to take a second to do my due diligence.
Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes?

(33:58):
This was a major subject clickbait from clickbait at the time,
most notably a Wired piece published the day after that
ended up racking up over thirty two million views. In
that piece, writer Adam Rodgers asked professor Bevill Conway, who
studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment, and
Professor Conway said that it was some combination of the

(34:19):
varying ways in which people perceive light, and that the
picture was just shitty quality and really blown out. Here's
his fancy science explanation. Your visual system is looking at
this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias
of the daylight axis. People either discount the blue side,
in which case they end up seeing white and gold,
or discount the gold side, in which case they end

(34:42):
up with blue and black. This also connects to the
maddening feeling of the dress switching colors before your eyes,
like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFeed video. So if
you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and
I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich
scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue
to the dress with some pretty interesting findings. They spoke

(35:05):
to fourteen hundred p respondents, with fifty seven percent seeing
black and blue, eleven percent black and brown, thirty percent
white and gold, and two percent. Other tests included showing
the dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see
if that's shifted by us, and a study from Pascal
Wallash showed the really interesting trend that people who woke

(35:26):
up early were more likely to see the dress as
white and gold, and people who went out at night
moore were likely to see black and blue. And I'll
admit reading about why your brain makes you see the
dress as one thing or the other is really really interesting,
even when what's being explained to you is a pretty
straightforward optical illusion. And even though as I'm writing this
episode this only happened about nine years ago, it feels

(35:49):
like it's longer. It reminds me of a targeted ad
I got for a T shirt sold by ClickHole, which,
if you're not familiar, is a spinoff of the Onion
that specifically satirized clickbait. The shirt says the Internet nineteen
eighty three to twenty fourteen, and it gets at this
feeling I'm having that shortly after the dress, the Internet

(36:10):
became less fun. Of course, this is coming from a
very Western, privileged perspective, but it's pretty commonly held that
in the US, around the time that the twenty sixteen
election cycle began, social media became less fun. Let's not
to say it was a cakewalk before. There are many
stories of discrimination and harassment that took place here, many
of which I'll cover on this show. But I'm trying

(36:32):
to get at the ratio of fun stories to existentially
terrifying stories, the ratio of hey, what color is this?
To bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream. The dress kind
of feels like the end of an era. Early twenty
fifteen wasn't an Internet that wasn't poisoned with hate, but
it felt like an Internet whose hate didn't poison everything,

(36:56):
and less than a year later that didn't really feel true.
I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress
story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to
better understand how the Internet shifted in the year after
the dress to bring us to the kind of viral
stories we were seeing in twenty sixteen. Just a year later.
For Perspective, their Ringers round up of twenty sixteen viral

(37:17):
stories included some classics like Chewbacco Mom, but also just
the word Nazism. So yeah, there was a mainstream shift
that had taken place. And this was for a reason,
not just because of the heightened bigoted extremism in the
Western world, but because of how our social networks were functioning.
It's something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as

(37:39):
recently as twenty nineteen, less than five years after the
dress story. In November twenty nineteen, he told Max Read
at Intelligencer, the dress was.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
A kind of perfect thing to catch fire at that moment,
the Internet was less polarized and politicized, and it had
shifted to mobile fully, so people were looking at mobile
devices with the dress. You saw it on your phone
and you were with people. You could hold the phone
up and say what color is this. Plus, in the
early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die in the

(38:08):
evening because people would watch television or go out with
their friends. Now, with mobile, we see primetime for our
content as the same as primetime for television. People are
sharing content and looking at content later.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Keep in mind this is a quote from less than
half a decade later, but the difference between twenty fifteen
and twenty nineteen on the US Internet made it feel
like he was talking about twenty years ago. I mean,
hell on the Internet. Forty years passed between November twenty
nineteen and November twenty twenty, and since this interview, BuzzFeed
has changed even more. Paretti pulled the plug on his

(38:44):
Pulitzer winning news operation only seven years after it launched
in twenty twenty three, and is currently focused on rerouting
BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing, yes, but not surprising, because after all,
Paretti start the company to operate on algorithms with no
creative at all, and now he has robots instead of writers,

(39:06):
and the company is worth less than ever. I talked
to a second author who published a great book about
social media and full disclosure, he's also my best friend's boyfriend.
He's the best and pertinent to you. He has a
thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have been forcibly
evolved and monetized to serve those that make them money,
not their users. Max Fisher currently co hosts Offline on

(39:28):
Crooked Media, and wrote about this very topic in twenty
twenty two's The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of how
Social Media rewired our minds and our world. Here's some
of our talk.

Speaker 8 (39:41):
My name is Max Fisher, and I'm a journalist and podcaster.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Because we're talking about the dress today is what is
your personal recollection of the dress? Saga? Were you you
were working in media at the time, right?

Speaker 8 (39:55):
I Not only was say working in media, but I
was working not at BuzzFeed, but at Fox dot com,
which was a fellow kind of web you know, new journalism,
left leaning startup that was trying to chase audience on
social media. So it felt very much kind of in
our wheelhouse. It was something that we were all really

(40:15):
excited about. Wow, look a post can get this much
attention by you know, doing something that Facebook really likes
and that social media algorithms really like. And we were
trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were
trying to do like, you know, the policy Wonk version
of the dress every day. So we thought it was
like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of
attention to.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
So I know that you've spent a lot of recent
years thinking about how our algorithms work, and you know
the implications of that. Were you thinking about this ten
years ago? What did that algorithm chasing look like?

Speaker 8 (40:51):
I was thinking about it, But like a lot of
journalists I think of our generation, I thought of it
as just purely a good thing, as just a thing
where it's like, oh, if I write my piece that
I was going to write anyway on the Iran nuclear deal,
but I phrased the headline in a certain way, then
Facebook can deliver me, thanks to its algorithm, huge amounts

(41:12):
of traffic and eyeballs and people who want to read
the story. And that's great, and that's so nice that
social media can be there to help us reach a
larger audience. So I was aware of it, but thought
of it as kind of a relatively neutral force, like, sure,
maybe you play up certain emotions in your headlines and
certain ideas that you know are likely or to go viral,

(41:33):
but again maybe like a lot of people. It wasn't
really until after Trump was elected, like a year and
a half after that, that I started to think of
social media and social media algorithms as something that could
be bad. At this point, I really thought that they
were just a good thing.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
And also just I think, certainly on my end, there
was a lack of thinking about how this algorithm chasing
translated to money, which in retrospect feel very naive of me,
but there was at the time. It seems like money
to be had from you know, taking these stories that

(42:09):
you would find on social media and then you know,
delivering them and making you know, question mark a shitload of.

Speaker 8 (42:17):
Money, right, I mean, the idea for the web startups
of that era was that you will get so many
more eyeballs on social media, and then so many more
people will click through to your website and they will
see ads on your website, so then you will make
more money and we weren't thinking of it, and maybe
you guys were breaking it in to the Boston BuzzFeed.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
But almost impossible to conceive that we were.

Speaker 8 (42:44):
I mean, maybe this was idealistic, but we were thinking
of it as this will be great because it will
make journalism sustainable. Like, we were all veterans of the
two thousand and eight financial crisis, so we had all
lived through a time when there were no jobs to
be had because the industry was collapsing because the Internet
social media had taken all of the revenue that used
to go through classifieds. So the idea that, aha, now

(43:06):
we're going to leverage that same social media to get
all these ad impressions. We can have a sustainable business again,
and won't that be so great for like the future
of the industry. And like before I worked at Fox,
I worked at the Washington Post, and they'd loved the
idea that you would do the journalism you were going
to do anyway, but right in in a way that
will please algorithms, or right the headline in a way
that will please algorithms, so that we can make more

(43:29):
money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So it
is a very starry eyed era that boy has sure
not aged well.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
Used a phrase that just feels very inherent to what
the dress was. You use a phrase the old algorithm.
What do you mean when you say the old algorithm?

Speaker 8 (43:47):
Oh? Yeah, okay, So I think we all know that
algorithms are what drive everything and how you experience social media.
There are the programs on every platform that select what
you see the order you see it in, that choose
what kind of emotions to surface, what kind of like

(44:09):
political valance to surface for you. They're the absolute core
of the social media business model. The era before algorithms,
social media was a loser business that didn't make any money,
and people didn't spend that much time on like rimbor MySpace,
You didn't spend that much time on the site live journal.
After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on
site exploded because they are so effective at making the

(44:33):
experience of being social media very engaging and addictive, and
that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So
for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked
from their first invention and like the end of the
two thousands, like Facebook kind of starts it in two
thousand and six with the Facebook news feed, but it
takes a while for their platforms to catch up up

(44:54):
through like the era of the dress, the way that
it worked, the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever
content was. They tend to promote outbound links, like it
will promote a link to some other website or news site,
even if it's like a lollcat or something something off

(45:14):
the platform, and it would be whatever is the link
that people would click on the most. And what that
tended to privilege is if you remember like upworthy. Upworthy
was like a website that existed to create content specifically
to cater to like the old Facebook algorithm, because it
was like curiosity gaps or it was like you won't

(45:35):
believe what happened next, so you're like, oh, I guess
I'll click on that link, and then you click on
that link, and then Facebook or Twitter learns, okay, we
promote that link to a lot of people, they will
click on it. And the dress is kind of the
last gasp of that old algorithm because it is again
you see the link and the way that it displayed
on not just Facebook, although Facebook was the big one

(45:57):
at the time, but all of the platforms read it Twitter,
it would displays you would see a cutoff image of
the dress, and then you would see a headline about
people see it in different colors, So it really makes
you want to click. So everybody who saw this link
on their news feed you were like, oh, I have
to click through and figure out what color the dress is,
even if you only spend eight seconds on that post.

(46:18):
The algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the
platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is
when BuzzFeed starts to get you know, a million people
a minute or whatever the numbers were.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Looking at it.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
A section of your book covers really thoroughly. Like twenty
fifteen is a really important year for this shift. So
the way that the algorithm looks in late February twenty
fifteen and at the end of the year seems pretty different.
What is changing with how algorithms are used on social
media throughout.

Speaker 8 (46:50):
This era, So there's not like a moment of shift,
like they don't pull a big lever and go over
to new set of algorithms. But bummer, bummer, I know,
but over like twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, the big
social media platforms make a bunch of incremental changes that
shift to a set of algorithms that just fundamentally privilege

(47:11):
a different set of things. The language that Facebook uses
for this, and they are kind of like leading the
charge at this point because they're still dominant way back
in this era, is that they want to start privileging
quote emotionally engaging interactions. And what that means is that
instead of pushing up to the top of your feed
whatever is the link to an outbound website that they

(47:34):
think you were likely is to click on, they want
to promote whatever content in your feed, whether that's a link,
or it's a discussion, or it's a Facebook group or
it's a photo that is going to generate the most
discussion on that post. And the reason they do that
is they want to keep you on the platforms because
if you click that outbound link, now you're on BuzzFeed,
and Facebook doesn't make any money from you spending time

(47:56):
on BuzzFeed. They want you to spend as much time
on Facebook in discussion whatever as they can. And they
frame this it's like, oh, we're going to start giving
you They call it like meaningful connections or like meaningful
interactions as if it's going to bring you, like all
sorts of love and friendship, but of course that is
not at all what it brings, because these algorithms are

(48:17):
incredibly ruthless in running billions of what are basically tests
like little social science experiments every single day. And what
is the exact kind of content that will get people
to engage in these quote unquote emotionally engaging interactions, not
just to spend time on the site, but also to
post back in the site in ways that we'll get

(48:37):
other people to spend time on the site. And like,
what is the content and the set of emotions that
are going to be most engaging. And like, you know,
as any any student of human nature will know, it's
not the nice stuff. It's not you know, here's your
friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new job promotion,

(48:58):
your aunt had a great it's outrage primarily, and especially
moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear or hatred
or discussed with some sort of social outgroup. And that
might be you know, political partisans on the other side
that for a lot of people, that's racial groups, religious groups, immigrants,

(49:20):
anything that cultivates a sense of like there is a
social group out there that I don't like, and I
find them to be scary, or I find them to
be offensive and I want to rally my in group
against them. That is the thing that the algorithms, as
they are being introduced to all of these platforms over
twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, learn to surface above all else.

(49:41):
And Facebook's own researchers are tracking all of this, and
they're finding both that this is enormously successful at making
people spend more time on the website, but also that
it's really bad for them. There's this paper that's kind
of the last gasp of when Facebook used to put
publish research into what their algorithm does with users. In

(50:03):
May twenty fifteen, Facebook's researchers, because they have accessed all
this data, published this paper warning that this change to
this new algorithm was sorting people into not just like
minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing whatever
was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme viewpoint

(50:24):
that everybody agreed with, and that that created an effect
that was quote associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over
time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a
somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme
in whatever beliefs they already held, and that they became
likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies, because of course, if

(50:47):
you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it
will make you feel even angrier.

Speaker 7 (50:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
I was fascinated to read how that information was at
one point public, and I think, like how it feels
completely inconceivable that they would publish anything like that to
the public just five years later or even two years later.
And how you know it was? It was well known
internally and it seems like I mean you explained I

(51:17):
think inside and also outside of Facebook, the sort of attempted,
the attempts to blow the whistle on like hey, this
is really not good for us. So I mean, it's
of course like profit is why that happens. But I
at what point do these platforms sort of switch to

(51:39):
infinite growth?

Speaker 8 (51:41):
So that had always been the business model since those
first days of the news feed back on the like
late two thousands, But what happens actually around the same time,
around twenty fourteen, is they start to realize that the
pool of human attention is and that's what they trade in.

(52:02):
That's their asset that they are chasing is seconds of
your day that you're spending on the platform, so they
can sell ads against it. And they realize around twenty
fourteen that they've kind of reached saturation collectively on how
much of that they hold. Where at this point people
spend As of twenty fourteen, people on average are spending
more time on social media platforms than they do interacting

(52:24):
with other people socially in real life, which is staggering.
And that gap, of course has only grown since. So
what they realize when they get to this point where
they realize, okay, we've kind of saturated the market for
how much human attention we can captures, they get into
this arms race with each other for who can hold

(52:45):
more of that attention. And that is when they go
from just having a existing business model of infinite growth
to needing to, like you said, take every step that
they can, no matter how extreme, to try to outcompete
each other for how much of that attention they hold.
And this is when all of the social media companies

(53:05):
again is around like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, higher up,
all of the big names and artificial intelligence. Like every
major European and American researcher at every big research university
suddenly works at Facebook, which is like that seems unsurprising
now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at the
time that was really shocking because this is just like

(53:26):
this was like Fancy or MySpace. This is just like
a weird little website, and all of a sudden, all
of these like rock stars of artificial intelligence work for
them because what they are doing is they are trying
to make the social media algorithms that govern what you
see as smart and as ruthless as possible. This is
when YouTube sets towards this big internal goal they have

(53:49):
for one billion hours of daily watch time, meaning that
everyone who uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours
of video every single day, which is ten times what
they had across the platform at the time they set
this goal. So they're starting to really design their business
models and their engineering around the idea that they need

(54:11):
to in order to survive drastically increase the stickiness and
addictiveness of being on their platform, which is when they
kind of start getting into all of these dark arts
of emotional and psychological manipulation.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
It feels so clear now and at the time where
you're like, this is weird.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Why am I so upset on.

Speaker 8 (54:32):
Well, the thing that I always think about that I
did not appreciate at the time. I didn't get its significance.
But looking back, I'm like, oh, okay, I see how
that was. Like a big watership moment is around twenty fifteen,
when gamer gait goes from being this thing that is
happening on the fringes of Reddit and the fringes of YouTube,

(54:54):
where it's like a bunch of like young white guys
are really mad about video games for some reason I
don't understand why, to all of a sudden it's completely
dominant on all of the social platforms, and it's the
like number one thing day after day on the platforms,
and all of these like weirdo gamer Gate characters like
Milo Gianopolis and Mike Cernovich, all of a sudden they're

(55:15):
like mainstream political figures. And that is we know now
in retrospect, because this is the time when social media
algorithms started to realize that stuff like gamer Gate was
going to be so so effective at increasing engagement. So
that's why when you go away from the social media
algorithms of the era of like the dress what you

(55:37):
get instead of the social media algorithms of gamer Gate,
which I would not consider a trade up.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
This is also the time where which I feel like
ties right into the Milo stuff, where Breitbart really starts
to pop off, and it feels to me, i mean,
very diabolical match of the BuzzFeed model of like luring
people in with really splashy headlines. As we're like coming

(56:03):
out of this era of the Dress and things were
getting more politicized and engagement driven to you know, really
monetize and push outrage. What are the success stories and
how do they sort of shape what the new algorithm favors.

Speaker 8 (56:19):
That's a great way to put it. I think you're
exactly right that if BuzzFeed and like upworthy were they
sites that embodied and benefited from the kind of pre
twenty fifteen social media ecosystem and algorithms, then the site
that embodies and most benefited from the post twenty fifteen
social media algorithms is definitely Brightbart. There was this huge

(56:43):
Harvard study or it was like led through Harvard, but
it was a ton of different scholars that came out
after the twenty sixteen election and was kind of trying
to ask, like, Okay, what happened, what was the like
something the internet played some role in the twenty sixteen election.
Social media played some role, but we're I'm not quite
sure what it is. So let's do like a big
systemic investigation into what the social web looked like in

(57:06):
the run up to the twenty sixteen election. And one
of the big things they found is that from May
twenty fifteen to November twenty sixteen, when the election was held,
which is kind of the onset of that era of
the new social media algorithms, Breitbart was the third most
shared media outlet on all of social media, which is

(57:28):
crazy when you know that Breitbart has like no staff,
they have no budget. It's a terrible experience to be
on their website. They don't produce very many articles. And
before this algorithmic shift, they had been a teeny tiny
little website with no readership. And there was like this
kind of narrative that like, oh, yes, Steve Bannon, who's

(57:48):
running Breitbart, is some like genius of the dark arts
of the social web. And what we learned from this
Harvard study and from a lot of subsequent investigations is
that he was not. The people of Breitbart were not
these geniuses. They were passive beneficiaries of the algorithms of
Facebook and Twitter, basically plucking this website and similar websites
out and pushing them in front of huge audiences of people.

(58:11):
Like Breitbart got more audience and engagement on Facebook than
Fox News did in the run up to the election,
and Fox News is like a bajillion dollar company with
hundreds of reporters.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
I mean, and certainly in the case of Breitbart, it
was just saying shit and presenting it as news, and
you know, like I wasn't saying fascistic shit, but there
were times where I was just kind of saying shit,
and they're like, and she's a reporter. I don't know,
it's interesting to reflect on.

Speaker 8 (58:45):
Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought about
that before. But you're right that this was kind of
the first stage and a shift that now feels much
more complete from getting your news from a news source
to then you're getting your news from a new source
repackaged for social media, So then you're getting your news
from a news source that is saying shit. I now

(59:06):
most of us get our news from people who are
just saying shit on social media, and we kind of
like trust or hope that the like viral posts that
we're reading is at some point sourced from something real,
and sometimes it is, and it's just spun in a
way to like get more engagement on social media. But
you know, it's just as possible that it's made up,

(59:28):
or that it's exaggerated, or that it's out of context.
So it is, in retrospect, like the start of a
larger shift to the just saying shit era of media consumption,
because on some level, you know, even though we do
all care about getting accurate information from credible sources, our
brains unfortunately are really really drawn to things that are

(59:53):
emotionally satisfying or that delivered like outrage which feels very
affirming to indulge in, or that deliver a sense of
like moral righteousness or in group versus out group, and
that can overpower that desire that we do also feel
for real credible information, which is of course only gotten
worse since twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Thanks so much to Max for speaking with me in
full disclosure. His cat is so large now I have
to be honest in the interest of contextualizing the dress
in real time, I did leave something off about its
longer future. To this day, there's an entire page about
the dress on the Roman Original's website where it was manufactured,
calling it the quote phenomenon that revealed differences in human

(01:00:36):
color perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific
investigation in neuroscience and vision science.

Speaker 5 (01:00:43):
I mean sure.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
And while some subjects on this show will require a
bonk on the head to fully remember who is Chili nighbor,
who is being dad sidebart, the mid character is so
often insert name of food, insert type of person, whatever,
but the dress rarely needs introduction if the person was
online at the time. There were retrospectives of the dress

(01:01:06):
story being written as recently as last year. When I'm
building out episodes for this show, step one is to
reach out to the main character themselves to see if
they want to talk. After all, the dress was for
someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated
at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she
was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage.

(01:01:27):
Cecilia and the married couple got the classic fifteen minutes
treatment for this era, the married couple Grace and Keir
and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to
la to be on the Ellen Show, and the couple
got a briefcase full of ten thousand American dollars. The
mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason,

(01:01:48):
half black and blue and half white and gold, and
that was it, and Cecilia was pissed from a Guardian
piece from late twenty fifteen.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Should it be on display somewhere?

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Blaisdell wonders, should it be in a whatever? It still
got sweaty marks on though, need the clean So nine
years later, I wanted to see where everyone was, and
that's where this story takes an especially dark turn. When
I went to find out where that couple is now,
I found this headline from July twenty twenty three. Man
behind viral blue black dress illusion charged with trying to

(01:02:21):
kill wife. I don't want to rehash it too heavily here,
but the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the
dress and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated
violent attempts on Grace's life isolating her from friends and
family and attempting to murder her during the spring of

(01:02:41):
twenty twenty two. He then went to court and denied
all charges and most clickbait in twenty twenty three because yes,
all of the same outlets reported on this story again
made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously
been used in a domestic violence awareness camp pain in
South Africa back in twenty fifteen, featuring a woman wearing

(01:03:04):
the dress in white and gold while covered in black
and blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see
black and blue? The ad asked. I think this ad
is very weird, even if the intention was well placed,
and the wave of twenty twenty three press connecting it
to the real life terror campaign taken out on Grace
felt just as wrong because virtually all of those pieces,

(01:03:26):
while sympathetic to her, ended in some tired version of
By the way, the dress was black and blue and
as of this month. In May twenty twenty four, I
am recording this a month after we finished this episode.
Kiir Johnston is being held in prison after pleading guilty
to attacking and attempting to kill Grace back in twenty

(01:03:48):
twenty two. At the time, Grace called and texted people
for help after years of reporting abuse and said that
her husband was trying to kill her after she was
violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened with a knife. As
of this recording, the case is ongoing, and we wish
Grace nothing but peace and getting as far away from

(01:04:09):
any of this fucking discourse as she needs to. And
it's further proof that any Internet story on a long
enough timeline begins to reflect the ugliness of the world
that the Internet reflects and so often warps. Okay, cutting
back into the original episode here, I'm sort of hesitant
to say that there's a clear lesson to be learned

(01:04:29):
from the saga of the dress, but it certainly encapsulates
a moment in Internet history that feels ungo backable, and
there's no better example of that than all the writers
who were paid at the time to make it mean
something outside of being an increasingly rare monocultural moment that
swirled in normal people with tech profits and our attention.

(01:04:51):
So the dress means something, but what exactly that is
is a little elusive. Almost ten years on, I feel
kind of nostalgic for a time where the Internet could
unite over a neutral issue. But as a twenty two
year old clickbait writer, I didn't even have the time
to appreciate it because I needed to form an edgy, smart,
adjacent opinion about it as quickly as possible. Here's a

(01:05:14):
passage from a reaction to the dress and the Lama's
success as stories on the heels of the net neutrality decision.
The essay is called the open Internet will keep us
stupid and happy. At this point, it's unfathomable to think
of anything short of a gale force windstorm full of
knives that could prevent the Internet from brimming with memes, gifts,

(01:05:35):
and asenine materials from content farms.

Speaker 7 (01:05:38):
Hell.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
I used to write for a content farm in Boston,
and yes, I have written an article called how Seth
MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West can
teach us about how to run our tech companies, and
that is objectively gross. The Internet is stupid, but it
was almost stupid and expensive. Thanks to the net neutrality
vote passed yesterday, we won't need to worry about our

(01:05:59):
access to lama and confusing dresses being hindered for now. Anyway, Yeah,
I wrote this, and what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways?
Good for her. I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again.
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jamie Loftus.

(01:06:21):
Our other executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans,
and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our
theme song is by Sadie Dupui and I would like
to thank all of the pets, Anderson the Dog, Mike, Kats,
Flee and Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who will
outlive us all. Bye e