June 18, 2024 • 55 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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Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Have you
ever heard the phrase so and so is the Internet's
main character for the day. That's when somebody does something
that everybody is talking about and they become social media's
(00:27):
main character. The Internet really has this way of flattening
people out, turning them into characters, and then just kind
of forgetting about them once they're fifteen minutes of fame
is over. But on a new podcast from our buds
over at cool Zone called The Sixteenth Minute Friend of
the Show, Jamie Loftus explores what happens in that sixteenth minute,
who these people are, and what their Internet fame or
(00:50):
infamy says about us as a culture. I joined Jamie
to discuss an Internet main character that we actually talked
about here on There Are No Girls on the Internet.
That lady who everybody got mad about after she tweeted
about really enjoying her mornings drinking coffee with her husband
in her garden.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Remember her.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's a story that I think really illustrates a lot
about how we're all coping these days, so check it
out and be sure to subscribe to the sixteenth minute.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but
being a woman on the internet sucks. It is bad.
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
(01:43):
it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl,
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
(02:03):
across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogenre to
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.
(02:25):
Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at
four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the
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
(02:48):
of ways to be a woman online and most of
them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere
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 gonna 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
(03:11):
paw of logging in. It's why when I was twelve
and posting on message boards lying out of my ass,
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
(03:31):
really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters
of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for
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
(03:55):
will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super
heavy lift. You know it's 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 resigns after only six weeks.
(04:19):
Midnights 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
(04:41):
man who 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
(05:01):
is terrific. 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. On the
(06:02):
morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two, a twenty
four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the following from
her Twitter account at Lil Plant Mommy.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
My husband and I wake up every morning and bring
our coffee out to her garden and sit and talk
for hours every morning. It never gets old and we
never run out of things to talk to.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
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 (06:45):
I wake up every day with chronic pain.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Carcel tunnel syndrome and.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
Wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk lattape.
Speaker 6 (06:56):
But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Put?
Speaker 6 (07:01):
What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work
in stuff?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Lol?
Speaker 6 (07:05):
This is cute and all that?
Speaker 5 (07:07):
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 (07:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
That is, unless you're flogging something 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 (07:53):
No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are
actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors so
they can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
They are capitalism. 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
(08:27):
was in a bad enough place when I saw this
story that while I recognized that the backlash of this
poor woman was ridiculous, I kind of resented her too.
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.
(08:48):
And at the time, I hadn't met anyone to either
drink coffee with or ruin my life with. But to
my credit, I had the wisdom do 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
(09:12):
thousand likes. This is about as close as it gets
to a full on public shaming 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
(09:33):
talking to people she only knows in real life, but
by 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
(09:54):
been outside of the realm of a very normal post
that she would make about a year before this, the
only other time the Wayback Machine Internet archives saved her page.
Daisy's bio read as follows.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic beauty
specialist branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
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
(10:38):
didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't
think dairy 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
(10:58):
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
(11:19):
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 3 (11:38):
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 4 (11:55):
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
(12:17):
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 (12:37):
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. It's
like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto
that person and they become this vehicle for making some
(13:01):
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 I.
Speaker 8 (13:20):
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 7 (13:27):
Well, but it was not. 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
(13:50):
think we've really seen it, especially since the Ylon era
like really take hold. And I think this is an
example of Twitter leaning hard into algorithmic recommendations. Were only
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
(14:11):
of generic tweet as a way to posture about whatever
they want to talk.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
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 this story doesn't
really thrive unless she also has thousands of people coming
to her defense, even though she's tweeting, you know, into
presumably to her the void. Do you remember when that
(14:39):
sort of phenomenon took.
Speaker 7 (14:41):
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 DoorDash 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 at that woman,
(15:02):
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 also just we're dealing with a lot of really
big problems in society, and people can't reach the people
(15:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
You know.
Speaker 8 (15:47):
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 (15:58):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:43):
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 hardcore misogyny, and of course a separate type
of really vicious hatred towards women of color or also
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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 like 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,
(17:48):
or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're
gonna get torn apart because that is what like misogynis
on the internet. Love to come for Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Thanks 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 became convinced that this story is also a pretty
(18:19):
damning 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. There's also this.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband and
folks said, not on my watch.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
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.
Privileged bitch eat.
Speaker 6 (19:06):
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 in their gardens
should be happy.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
I feel like this is 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 4 (19:31):
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 Jellylooz,
she described what it was like experiencing these waves of
discourse in what felt like a void.
Speaker 9 (19:51):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:54):
in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I
kind of think that it like went in this wave
of negativity, and then there was like another way where
it was like where it got more popular, but then
it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
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,
(21:31):
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 3 (21:50):
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 don'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
(22:11):
that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if
they do, you must be rich.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Y'all are truly silly.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
But thank you to all the sweet comments. I love
you so much, double heart emoji.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
And to directly address her haters who claimed that she
was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
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 4 (22:46):
Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here, and 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
(23:07):
a number of other pictures in their garden, 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?
(23:29):
Because the algorithm said so, There's no way 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
(23:51):
in their garden, it's possible you spend too much time online.
That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's post has all
the markers 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
(24:15):
the kind of anger we reserve 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
(24:37):
is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
Speaker 9 (24:40):
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
(25:04):
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 compassion for those people because truly, maybe
they know better, but they probably don't know any better,
but they're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing
(25:25):
with it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
Speaker 6 (25:28):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
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
(25:50):
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
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
(26:12):
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 tool?
(26:34):
And when is it? Whatever the fuck this is, I
wanted to ask her about it first.
Speaker 10 (26:39):
I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at
Crooked Media.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
You are the person that I associate most with, like
intensely feeling about this story.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
I am the person you most associate with the concept
of shame.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an
interview here, but 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 10 (27:14):
A few years ago, I wrote a 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 dogpile culture, co signing shaming, which
(27:37):
is not at all what I was talking about in
the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Uh.
Speaker 10 (27:47):
It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of
a reflective experience, not an external experience.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Shame is for Shame is for me.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
It's not for.
Speaker 10 (28:01):
You, you know, it's like so to me. I mean basically, like,
my 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.
(28:24):
But yeah, this was one of those things, like that
was a 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 mourning, right,
(28:45):
kill yourself.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
Speaker 10 (28:56):
That's a really good question.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I think you have to.
Speaker 10 (29:00):
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. Right,
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.
(29:25):
But as far as a productive way to shame, to
shame the average per I mean, no, I don't think so,
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,
(29:47):
I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Your impact is felt on this podcast.
Speaker 10 (29:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire.
You can catch every day over at Crooked Media and
we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's sixteenth minute.
Maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had six
(30:24):
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
(30:44):
of hetero couples, Husbands who adore their wives 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 on to Coffee Wife, I
still think this boils down to an Internet classic. Women
are fair game for just about anything. There's no social
(31:08):
incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband, because
when a woman adores spending time with her husband, So what,
it would be selfish of her to 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 made in
(31:31):
general gender perception. But while I do firmly 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
(31:53):
and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best, bigoted
and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarch 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
(32:14):
bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as
simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who
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
(32:35):
famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the
bestseller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women 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
(32:57):
of infinite growth. And second of all, she's using her
position as a powerful woman to sell you something. And
that 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. Here's a quote. I'm sorry if
(33:19):
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, thanks, Cheryl.
(33:45):
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 word to
(34:07):
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 girl
(34:28):
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 change minds or
(34:51):
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 of sense.
(35:14):
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 instead of what
(35:35):
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
(35:56):
further down. Users got really pissed 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 posts like
(36:17):
daisies that would get sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed,
the one you didn't ask for and the one that
no one is prepared to be sorted into. And within
a week of the Coffee Wife flare up, a looming
Twitter acquisition was finally completed. After months of legal wrangling
(36:38):
and negotiation, Elon Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter.
Earlier in 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
(36:59):
shareholder at nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal
at forty four billion dollars and Twitter accepted the offer
very quickly. 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
(37:21):
would mean less bots and more free speech. He certainly
made good on the former in the fascist content is
king sense, 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
(37:43):
was famously a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out
of the objectively bad deal that was his idea in July,
but was unable 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
(38:03):
decline ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents
since this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones
back to Twitter and generally promoting fascists 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
(38:28):
we can see the coffee wife incident through as this
dying gasp of old school misogyny on Twitter, moments before
it was about to get much, much, much worse. And
(38:53):
how bad hasn't gotten on the Internet since twenty twenty two.
I went to an expert, my pal, Bridget Todd, host
of the incredible podcast there Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd. I'm 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 4 (39:20):
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 1 (39:27):
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.
(39:49):
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
(40:09):
were all 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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
All of that, and I also.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Think we were all feeling the sort of like existential.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Dread of how reality feels right now.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right Everything is expensive, rents are rising, Inflation is terrible.
It just feels like we are being squeezed from so
many different angles.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
And so when somebody comes along.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
With just pure Joel, the pure Joel 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 4 (41:12):
That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've
been having, I'd be curious what you think about that,
of 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 1 (41:29):
Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you on that.
I mean, I can speak for myself. I am not
proud of what the pandemic, how I responded to the
pandemic socially, right, I also am a pretty socially anxious person.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
I'm somebody who's in.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
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
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
(42:08):
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. It wasn't impacting me the
way that it was. I'm not an essential worker, right,
and so I think that for me personally, it was.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Strange, too deep.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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? You know, Like why is no 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.
(42:46):
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 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
(43:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
A garden, I don't have a husband.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
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 disregulated that that's that
this woman, this random woman's tweet is making you feel
(43:40):
that way.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
But I also kind of get it.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
You're totally right. 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 manager infesting as a political statement. I
(44:02):
can't quite get 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
(44:25):
dogpile on someone who cannot help them, right.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I do think there's a gendered aspect to it. 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, workouts that she eats right, she starts her
(44:52):
day with like lemon water or macha instead of coffee whatever.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
It is, three gorgeous children who are wealthy sat Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
I think that coffee Lady's 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 2 (45:20):
Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Doing a million other things.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Sure I shouldn't be taking a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
But who does that right? And so I think there
is something where women.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
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 crap that you don't. I don't think she was.
I certainly don't think she was trying to do that.
But that's I think that's probably how it hit some
(46:08):
of us.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
The Internet, I think, like a lot of things is
sort of built to make women angry at each other
and present each other. And yeah, I mean, could you
speak to that a little bit. I know that that's
your beat.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Like shit about themselves. That's just a fact, right.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
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
(47:04):
cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off
of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us
being in competition with each other 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 whatever. Whatever, algorithms
trick us into thinking that all of these great things
(47:26):
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.
And none of that is by mistake and it's all
(47:47):
by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
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 enough to
(48:14):
say I'm not interested. And the only way to 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. And so I ran
(48:34):
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 1 (48:48):
Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
I completely agree with you, 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 gleamed like, oh, she
has a little bit of an issue with X y Z.
(49:09):
Let's get showing it to her and see what happens.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, really that cool.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
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 it routes at the
person because you can't you know the real kind of Yeah,
this suendse conspiratorial, but like the real enemy has no face, right,
(49:37):
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. And it's
(50:00):
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 1 (50:12):
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,
(50:32):
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 4 (50:44):
What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
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 in
my like regular home. I think that it.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Is very easy.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
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, but the fact
(51:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I think.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the
things that we want we cannot have.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
So that's one two.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
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
(52:17):
that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality
to the right places.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
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 4 (52:36):
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
(52:58):
just don't want a dumb bitch podcast 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
(53:19):
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 (53:43):
Oh I should I guess it?
Speaker 4 (53:44):
Should hold?
Speaker 6 (53:45):
I should hold it.
Speaker 4 (53:46):
You're right, get your coffee.
Speaker 5 (53:47):
Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've
gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
And we don't have a garden. We do have a
little deck, but I just kind of we have.
Speaker 5 (54:01):
A bug in the house though, Casper Casper bugs.
Speaker 4 (54:07):
We do two bugs.
Speaker 8 (54:08):
I just the deck kind of stresses me out because
there's so much pollution. Who were across the street from
a We shouldn't say where, we know.
Speaker 5 (54:15):
We should, but you can visualize the pollution because we
can see all of the gathering dust, so much dust,
the accumulated dusts.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
Speaker 9 (54:25):
They are, they're kissing right now. There is looking Casper's forehead.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're
the same size.
Speaker 5 (54:34):
Now.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
It's great.
Speaker 5 (54:37):
We could try this in a garden at some point though,
don't you think.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of cool Zone Media and
iHeart Radio. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert
Evans lemizing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to
Brant Crater and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet
(55:08):
shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cats Flee
and Casper, and my pet Rock Bert, who will outlive
us all Ye
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Toad and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Have you
ever heard the phrase so and so is the Internet's
main character for the day. That's when somebody does something
that everybody is talking about and they become social media's
(00:27):
main character. The Internet really has this way of flattening
people out, turning them into characters, and then just kind
of forgetting about them once they're fifteen minutes of fame
is over. But on a new podcast from our buds
over at cool Zone called The Sixteenth Minute Friend of
the Show, Jamie Loftus explores what happens in that sixteenth minute,
who these people are, and what their Internet fame or
(00:50):
infamy says about us as a culture. I joined Jamie
to discuss an Internet main character that we actually talked
about here on There Are No Girls on the Internet.
That lady who everybody got mad about after she tweeted
about really enjoying her mornings drinking coffee with her husband
in her garden.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Remember her.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's a story that I think really illustrates a lot
about how we're all coping these days, so check it
out and be sure to subscribe to the sixteenth minute.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Okay, I don't know if you've heard this one, but
being a woman on the internet sucks. It is bad.
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
(01:43):
it sucks so much that it's bad writing for me
to even tell you that. But if you're a woman, girl,
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
(02:03):
across many lines, and intersecting marginalized identities tends to mean
worse abuse. That's why we have terms like misogenre to
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.
(02:25):
Trans women face threats of violence and violent actions at
four times the rate of CIS women, compounded by the
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
(02:48):
of ways to be a woman online and most of
them fucking suck. And that's because being a woman anywhere
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 gonna 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
(03:11):
paw of logging in. It's why when I was twelve
and posting on message boards lying out of my ass,
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
(03:31):
really cool stuff. And while there were many main characters
of the Internet who became notorious or were pilloried for
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
(03:55):
will to October twenty twenty two. Shouldn't be a super
heavy lift. You know it's 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 resigns after only six weeks.
(04:19):
Midnights 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
(04:41):
man who 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
(05:01):
is terrific. 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. On the
(06:02):
morning of October twenty first, twenty twenty two, a twenty
four year old woman named Daisy tweeted the following from
her Twitter account at Lil Plant Mommy.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
My husband and I wake up every morning and bring
our coffee out to her garden and sit and talk
for hours every morning. It never gets old and we
never run out of things to talk to.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
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 (06:45):
I wake up every day with chronic pain.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Carcel tunnel syndrome and.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
Wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk lattape.
Speaker 6 (06:56):
But whatever, potato potato? Am I right? For hours?
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Put?
Speaker 6 (07:01):
What if we weren't inherently wealthy and have to work
in stuff?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Lol?
Speaker 6 (07:05):
This is cute and all that?
Speaker 5 (07:07):
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 (07:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
That is, unless you're flogging something 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 (07:53):
No. No, they're a small business owner, so they are
actively participating and taking advantage of other people's labors so
they can have these blissful mornings. They are capitalism.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
They are capitalism. 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
(08:27):
was in a bad enough place when I saw this
story that while I recognized that the backlash of this
poor woman was ridiculous, I kind of resented her too.
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.
(08:48):
And at the time, I hadn't met anyone to either
drink coffee with or ruin my life with. But to
my credit, I had the wisdom do 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
(09:12):
thousand likes. This is about as close as it gets
to a full on public shaming 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
(09:33):
talking to people she only knows in real life, but
by 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
(09:54):
been outside of the realm of a very normal post
that she would make about a year before this, the
only other time the Wayback Machine Internet archives saved her page.
Daisy's bio read as follows.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Naturopathic medicine student, white woman's student emoji, licensed holistic beauty
specialist branch emoji, sustainable gardener, white woman gardener emoji.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
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
(10:38):
didn't agree with some of it. I mean, I don't
think dairy 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
(10:58):
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
(11:19):
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 3 (11:38):
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 4 (11:55):
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
(12:17):
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 (12:37):
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. It's
like somebody goes viral and everybody projects their ideology onto
that person and they become this vehicle for making some
(13:01):
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 I.
Speaker 8 (13:20):
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 7 (13:27):
Well, but it was not. 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
(13:50):
think we've really seen it, especially since the Ylon era
like really take hold. And I think this is an
example of Twitter leaning hard into algorithmic recommendations. Were only
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
(14:11):
of generic tweet as a way to posture about whatever
they want to talk.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
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 this story doesn't
really thrive unless she also has thousands of people coming
to her defense, even though she's tweeting, you know, into
presumably to her the void. Do you remember when that
(14:39):
sort of phenomenon took.
Speaker 7 (14:41):
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 DoorDash 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 at that woman,
(15:02):
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 also just we're dealing with a lot of really
big problems in society, and people can't reach the people
(15:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
You know.
Speaker 8 (15:47):
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 (15:58):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:43):
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 hardcore misogyny, and of course a separate type
of really vicious hatred towards women of color or also
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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 like 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,
(17:48):
or seen as a slightly privileged wife and mother, you're
gonna get torn apart because that is what like misogynis
on the internet. Love to come for Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Thanks 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 became convinced that this story is also a pretty
(18:19):
damning 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. There's also this.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
That lady said she enjoys mornings with her husband and
folks said, not on my watch.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
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.
Privileged bitch eat.
Speaker 6 (19:06):
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 in their gardens
should be happy.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
I feel like this is 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 4 (19:31):
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 Jellylooz,
she described what it was like experiencing these waves of
discourse in what felt like a void.
Speaker 9 (19:51):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:54):
in positivity and kindness and love. And so then I
kind of think that it like went in this wave
of negativity, and then there was like another way where
it was like where it got more popular, but then
it was like turned into something really sweet and positive.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
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,
(21:31):
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 3 (21:50):
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 don'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
(22:11):
that couples shouldn't have to spend time together and if
they do, you must be rich.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Y'all are truly silly.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
But thank you to all the sweet comments. I love
you so much, double heart emoji.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
And to directly address her haters who claimed that she
was capitalism, Daisy tweeted this.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
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 4 (22:46):
Daisy threads the needle pretty beautifully here, and 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
(23:07):
a number of other pictures in their garden, 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?
(23:29):
Because the algorithm said so, There's no way 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
(23:51):
in their garden, it's possible you spend too much time online.
That's because despite it seeming innocuous, Daisy's post has all
the markers 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
(24:15):
the kind of anger we reserve 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
(24:37):
is on that same Angelilou's YouTube podcast.
Speaker 9 (24:40):
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
(25:04):
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 compassion for those people because truly, maybe
they know better, but they probably don't know any better,
but they're just dealing with their hurt and they're dealing
(25:25):
with it like that instead of in other healthy ways.
Speaker 6 (25:28):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
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
(25:50):
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
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
(26:12):
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 tool?
(26:34):
And when is it? Whatever the fuck this is, I
wanted to ask her about it first.
Speaker 10 (26:39):
I am Julia Claire. I'm a comedian and writer at
Crooked Media.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
You are the person that I associate most with, like
intensely feeling about this story.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
I am the person you most associate with the concept
of shame.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Yes, yes, and so it really you've saved me an
interview here, but 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 10 (27:14):
A few years ago, I wrote a 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 dogpile culture, co signing shaming, which
(27:37):
is not at all what I was talking about in
the piece. I think of shame as any lapsed Catholic would.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Uh.
Speaker 10 (27:47):
It's a very kind of like internal experience, more of
a reflective experience, not an external experience.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Shame is for Shame is for me.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
It's not for.
Speaker 10 (28:01):
You, you know, it's like so to me. I mean basically, like,
my 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.
(28:24):
But yeah, this was one of those things, like that
was a 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 mourning, right,
(28:45):
kill yourself.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Is there a productive way to shame someone on the internet.
Speaker 10 (28:56):
That's a really good question.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I think you have to.
Speaker 10 (29:00):
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. Right,
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.
(29:25):
But as far as a productive way to shame, to
shame the average per I mean, no, I don't think so,
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,
(29:47):
I know, Father Leroy at Saint Edward's Parish.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Your impact is felt on this podcast.
Speaker 10 (29:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
Thank you so much to my best friend Julia Claire.
You can catch every day over at Crooked Media and
we'll be right back with more of Coffee Wife's sixteenth minute.
Maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute today. I've had six
(30:24):
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
(30:44):
of hetero couples, Husbands who adore their wives 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 on to Coffee Wife, I
still think this boils down to an Internet classic. Women
are fair game for just about anything. There's no social
(31:08):
incentive for Daisy to say she loves her husband, because
when a woman adores spending time with her husband, So what,
it would be selfish of her to 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 made in
(31:31):
general gender perception. But while I do firmly 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
(31:53):
and myself, to behave in an insensitive at best, bigoted
and benefiting from the whiteness that patriarch 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
(32:14):
bunch of conflicting definitions of this term. Some are as
simple as quote a woman, especially a young woman who
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
(32:35):
famous example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the
bestseller Lean In in twenty thirteen to encourage women 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
(32:57):
of infinite growth. And second of all, she's using her
position as a powerful woman to sell you something. And
that 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. Here's a quote. I'm sorry if
(33:19):
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, thanks, Cheryl.
(33:45):
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 word to
(34:07):
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 girl
(34:28):
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 change minds or
(34:51):
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 of sense.
(35:14):
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 instead of what
(35:35):
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
(35:56):
further down. Users got really pissed 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 posts like
(36:17):
daisies that would get sorted into this new algorithmically driven feed,
the one you didn't ask for and the one that
no one is prepared to be sorted into. And within
a week of the Coffee Wife flare up, a looming
Twitter acquisition was finally completed. After months of legal wrangling
(36:38):
and negotiation, Elon Musk has finally bought social media company Twitter.
Earlier in 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
(36:59):
shareholder at nearly ten percent. This put the prospective deal
at forty four billion dollars and Twitter accepted the offer
very quickly. 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
(37:21):
would mean less bots and more free speech. He certainly
made good on the former in the fascist content is
king sense, 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
(37:43):
was famously a disaster. Elon Musk tried to back out
of the objectively bad deal that was his idea in July,
but was unable 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
(38:03):
decline ever since. Just a small sampler platter of incidents
since this time, welcoming Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones
back to Twitter and generally promoting fascists 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
(38:28):
we can see the coffee wife incident through as this
dying gasp of old school misogyny on Twitter, moments before
it was about to get much, much, much worse. And
(38:53):
how bad hasn't gotten on the Internet since twenty twenty two.
I went to an expert, my pal, Bridget Todd, host
of the incredible podcast there Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Here's our chat. My name is Bridget Todd. I'm 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 4 (39:20):
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 1 (39:27):
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.
(39:49):
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
(40:09):
were all 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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
All of that, and I also.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Think we were all feeling the sort of like existential.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Dread of how reality feels right now.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right Everything is expensive, rents are rising, Inflation is terrible.
It just feels like we are being squeezed from so
many different angles.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
And so when somebody comes along.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
With just pure Joel, the pure Joel 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 4 (41:12):
That's so interesting. I think of all the conversations I've
been having, I'd be curious what you think about that,
of 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 1 (41:29):
Yeah, boy, do I identify with that and feel you on that.
I mean, I can speak for myself. I am not
proud of what the pandemic, how I responded to the
pandemic socially, right, I also am a pretty socially anxious person.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
I'm somebody who's in.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
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
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
(42:08):
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. It wasn't impacting me the
way that it was. I'm not an essential worker, right,
and so I think that for me personally, it was.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Strange, too deep.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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? You know, Like why is no 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.
(42:46):
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 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
(43:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
A garden, I don't have a husband.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
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 disregulated that that's that
this woman, this random woman's tweet is making you feel
(43:40):
that way.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
But I also kind of get it.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
You're totally right. 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 manager infesting as a political statement. I
(44:02):
can't quite get 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
(44:25):
dogpile on someone who cannot help them, right.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I do think there's a gendered aspect to it. 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, workouts that she eats right, she starts her
(44:52):
day with like lemon water or macha instead of coffee whatever.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
It is, three gorgeous children who are wealthy sat Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
I think that coffee Lady's 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 2 (45:20):
Serenely drinking coffee in my garden.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Doing a million other things.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Sure I shouldn't be taking a moment smelling the flowers, journaling, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
But yes, gratitude journal exactly.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
But who does that right? And so I think there
is something where women.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
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 crap that you don't. I don't think she was.
I certainly don't think she was trying to do that.
But that's I think that's probably how it hit some
(46:08):
of us.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
The Internet, I think, like a lot of things is
sort of built to make women angry at each other
and present each other. And yeah, I mean, could you
speak to that a little bit. I know that that's
your beat.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Like shit about themselves. That's just a fact, right.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
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
(47:04):
cycle that is making other people, mostly men, rich off
of our anxiety, off of our fears, off of us
being in competition with each other 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 whatever. Whatever, algorithms
trick us into thinking that all of these great things
(47:26):
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.
And none of that is by mistake and it's all
(47:47):
by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
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 enough to
(48:14):
say I'm not interested. And the only way to 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. And so I ran
(48:34):
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 1 (48:48):
Yes, And so it's so I've experienced the exact same thing.
I completely agree with you, 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 gleamed like, oh, she
has a little bit of an issue with X y Z.
(49:09):
Let's get showing it to her and see what happens.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, really that cool.
Speaker 4 (49:14):
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 it routes at the
person because you can't you know the real kind of Yeah,
this suendse conspiratorial, but like the real enemy has no face, right,
(49:37):
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. And it's
(50:00):
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 1 (50:12):
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,
(50:32):
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 4 (50:44):
What can we What can the collective learn from Coffee Wife.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
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 in
my like regular home. I think that it.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Is very easy.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
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, but the fact
(51:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I think.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
I think it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking the
things that we want we cannot have.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
So that's one two.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
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
(52:17):
that we should direct our rage and anger and emotionality
to the right places.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
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 4 (52:36):
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
(52:58):
just don't want a dumb bitch podcast 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
(53:19):
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 (53:43):
Oh I should I guess it?
Speaker 4 (53:44):
Should hold?
Speaker 6 (53:45):
I should hold it.
Speaker 4 (53:46):
You're right, get your coffee.
Speaker 5 (53:47):
Yeah, but hey, coffee in the morning, even after I've
gotten off my damn shift, coffee with my wife.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
And we don't have a garden. We do have a
little deck, but I just kind of we have.
Speaker 5 (54:01):
A bug in the house though, Casper Casper bugs.
Speaker 4 (54:07):
We do two bugs.
Speaker 8 (54:08):
I just the deck kind of stresses me out because
there's so much pollution. Who were across the street from
a We shouldn't say where, we know.
Speaker 5 (54:15):
We should, but you can visualize the pollution because we
can see all of the gathering dust, so much dust,
the accumulated dusts.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
So you just walked up to Casper and started kissing him.
Speaker 9 (54:25):
They are, they're kissing right now. There is looking Casper's forehead.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
You love saying you're so dirty, You're so dirty. They're
the same size.
Speaker 5 (54:34):
Now.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
It's great.
Speaker 5 (54:37):
We could try this in a garden at some point though,
don't you think.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of cool Zone Media and
iHeart Radio. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert
Evans lemizing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Special thanks to
Brant Crater and Sophie Lichterman for doing voiceover and pet
(55:08):
shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cats Flee
and Casper, and my pet Rock Bert, who will outlive
us all Ye
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