Brian Merchant: How LA really made the internet what it is
by Brian Merchant, Los Angeles Times
Oct 09, 2023
4 minutes
The influencers have won. Digital media institutions are crumbling. We have pivoted to video. The internet of the 2020s is dominated by a handful of platforms — Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube — and the creators who rule them. Now even the mighty entertainment industry is in their thrall.
The story of how we got here is the subject of Taylor Lorenz’s compelling and expansive new book, “Extremely Online” — and it is, at heart, a story about the allure of fame, the desire to perform for a living, and how companies seeking to profit off of those base impulses encourage the hopeful to commoditize their personal experience.
It is, in other
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