One of America’s Most Polarizing Reporters Just Published Her First Book. Uh-oh.

In the summer of 2013, a quartet of power users of Vine, the short-lived looping video app, announced an in-person meetup for their followers. The four personalities, Jérôme Jarre, Rudy Mancuso, Marcus Johns, and Nicholas Megalis, had recently realized they were basically the most popular people on the platform—Johns had just reached 1 million followers—and were curious how many people might show up.

As chronicled in the reporter Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online, when the four arrived at New York’s Central Park, they were swarmed by hundreds of fans, mostly children and teenagers. They decamped to a nearby boulder, where they snapped selfies, shot Vines, and crowd-surfed. “That was when we realized,” said Mancuso: “Oh, these people are real!”

Readers of Lorenz’s work at the many outlets where she’s written in the social media era are familiar with this sentiment. At the Washington Post—and before that, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, Business Insider, and Mic—her reporting has identified the real people populating the internet, the users and creators both who are building entire systems of influence and money outside the old-media bubble. She’s revealed characters as odious as Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, and as admirable as Jalaiah Harmon, the young dancer whose Renegade went viral but who received little credit until Lorenz wrote about her in the Times.

In the process, she herself has also become something of a recurring character in the internet’s roiling drama. Often that’s not by any choice of her own; when Tucker Carlson starts talking about you, you’ve been thrust into the limelight entirely against your will. But Lorenz is also a dedicated poster whose own extremely online temperament is in some ways perfectly suited to the requirements of the job. Like a war correspondent who dashes into the line of fire, Lorenz seems unwilling—or unable—to stay out of the conversation, because that’s where the story is. Among journalists, few online characters are so compelling or so divisive. One colleague, told I was writing about this book, joked that finally we would get the chance to find out if Slate readers cared about Taylor Lorenz as much as Slate staffers do.

Lorenz positions Extremely Online not as a history of the internet but as “a social history of social media,” an account of the ways that, again and again, users have broken free of the constraints of the online platforms that hosted them, innovating in ways the tech gurus could never have predicted. Instagram did not expect the company’s early stance against brand advertising would help create the stealth influencer economy; YouTube never counted on nobodies becoming immensely popular by recording long, personal video diaries. Extremely Online is about the creators, the people who shoot vlogs or figure out the secret to appearing on every TikTokker’s For You Page, and it takes as a given that to make something that becomes wildly popular on the internet is the defining aspiration of the 21^st century.

Early in the book, Lorenz showcases Paris Hilton and Julia Allison, early-century celebrities who both became, in the disapproving words of Barbara Walters, “famous for being famous.” Lorenz’s spirited defense of Allison sets the stage for the book’s central argument. “What Julia Allison did better than anyone in her generation was to leverage attention on the internet and shrewdly monetize it,” Lorenz writes. “These two practices are commonplace today, but in the mid-2000s, they were radical.” The question I found myself asking, which Extremely Online never addresses, is really square, but nevertheless crucial: Is this good?

Throughout Extremely Online, Lorenz recounts how ordinary people stumbled into fame based on the force of their personality and their facility with the tools of whatever app teenagers are downloading fastest. The names flash by so quickly that the uninitiated can miss entire micro-eras of online popularity: “15-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, who portrayed an alter ego named Fred Figglehorn on YouTube”; Adam Bahner, “a 24-year-old self-described nerd in his third year of a PhD program” who started uploading videos under the name Tay Zonday; Tayser Abuhamdeh, a 24-year-old cashier who livestreamed his days at a Brooklyn corner store and, by the time he was fired, had “amassed over 135,000 followers and was making triple what he’d made at the bodega.” All these personalities and dozens more experience a dizzying shift in their lives: They suddenly have “more fame than they knew what to do with.”

That this state of things might actually be horrible, a kind of monkey’s-paw curse delivered upon these online savants, is not a possibility that Lorenz brooks. What matters is only whether they can monetize that fame. The creators in Extremely Online do battle with their own platforms, which struggle to deal with how important top creators—unpredictable, unruly, often only teens themselves—are to their businesses’ bottom lines. Lorenz charts dizzying ecosystems of evanescent enterprises launched to suck money out of the air and deliver it to creators (with a healthy percentage skimmed for the entrepreneurs, presumably): Next New Networks, Fullscreen, VidCon, Niche. Most engaging is Ben Lashes, manager to the meme stars, who delivers the deathless line, “This is the chosen one,” about Grumpy Cat.

Extremely Online is full of such quotes, many of them content-free hype bombs delivered utterly sincerely and reprinted by Lorenz with an uncannily blank affect. “When he read me the lyrics, I was like, ‘Dude, are you serious?’ ” says Chris Vaccarino, who runs a company called Fanjoy that makes merch for online creators. He’s referring to YouTube star Jake Paul’s 2017 Christmas song “Fanjoy to the World,” with its lyrics, “Fanjoy to the world, my merch has come.” The merch drop, Lorenz notes, “reportedly generated tens of millions of dollars.”

One section that really got to me, an old person, was Lorenz’s account of what happened in 2017, when the Federal Trade Commission laid down the law on stealth advertising on Instagram. Advertisers and creators worried that the introduction of the #ad tag on paid content would tank the business. Instead, followers paid the tags no mind—or, in some cases, engaged with sponsored content more than nonsponsored. “The FTC,” Lorenz writes, “could not have done creators a bigger service.” Soon, wannabe influencers were tagging their posts #ad even if they had no relationship with the company in question. “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool,” a teenager tells Lorenz. “Like, I got this for free while all you losers are paying.”

I would describe such passages as “uncritical,” by which I don’t mean that I wish Lorenz was passing negative judgment on such behavior. It’s not exactly that I think Lorenz should—as my former colleague Ruth Graham once witheringly suggested that dumb readers want reporters to do—add parentheticals to each paragraph reading “(This was good.)” or “(This was bad.”), though I confess it might ease my mind if she did it just once. Mostly I mean that Lorenz seldom engages in any truly critical way with the events she recounts in her book, rarely interrogates or seems to think deeply about them. Even the content itself, an ideal object for criticism, is rarely given this kind of treatment. She struggles—or more accurately, rarely even tries—to explain what it is these Vines or YouTubes or posts are doing that is so engaging to their audiences.

One passage, about “relatable” YouTuber Emma Chamberlain, is notable for its elegant consideration of her aesthetic and the work it takes to maintain it; if it seems familiar, that’s because it is mostly a rewrite of Lorenz’s terrific 2019 Atlantic piece about Chamberlain. But elsewhere, critical analysis is absent. “One video that Logan Paul posted at the time, where he did splits in famous locations around the world, amassed over 20 million views,” she writes. PewDiePie’s videos “appealed to what his fans called ‘edgy humor.’ ” (As a reminder, Paul and PewDiePie are bad.) Lorenz describes a particularly horrifying video, in which YouTuber Sam Pepper staged a fake murder, but leaves the analysis to another YouTuber: “i’m actually sick to my stomach and that should not be allowed on the internet.” “All the attention only resulted in more views,” Lorenz writes, “and Pepper’s follower count popped.”

The blandness of that sentence is representative of much of Lorenz’s writing in Extremely Online. Lorenz is fond of the section-ending button that says nearly nothing: “Nothing will ever be the same.” “A bunch of those influencers were done waiting.” “The algorithm had spoken.” At times, Lorenz’s prose sounds, itself, like the product of an algorithm: “Building on the Digitour experiment, Magcon had reset the equation.” Seeking to segue from one Vine star to another, Lorenz seemingly throws up her hands and simply writes, “There was also Rudy Mancuso.” Indeed, there was, also, Rudy Mancuso.

And while Lorenz has a scorekeeper’s detailed understanding of, say, the ins and outs of Snapchat feuds in 2016, her grasp on earlier media and culture events is shakier. She credits the downfall of newspapers and old media to blogs, ignoring plummeting classified revenue, private equity vultures, and the papers’ own clumsy early attempts to go online. She asserts that Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life premiered to almost 13 million viewers, “unheard-of numbers in reality TV”—though Survivor premiered bigger and, that same year, routinely attracted 20 million viewers per episode.

But whatever. We are not reading Taylor Lorenz for her analysis of early-2000s TV! We are reading her because she has a preternatural talent for informing nonteenagers about people whom millions of teenagers love passionately. Unfortunately, for the most part Extremely Online fails to make use of its author’s superpower. Despite the subtitle’s promise of “the untold story,” the majority of the book seems based on the extensive work that mainstream and online reporters, including Lorenz herself, have done covering the influencer and creator worlds. (One notable exception is the section on Allison, a new entry in the pantheon of classic Lorenz gets.) Even the fresh quotes, and there are some, mostly come from characters familiar to anyone who’s read widely on the subject. To be sure, Lorenz is generous in citing her sources and makes a welcome point of thanking the women tech reporters who have carved out their own niches in a male-dominated industry, from Katie Notopoulos to Kat Tenbarge to Kelsey Weekman. I don’t know if she simply felt that any scoops had to go straight into the newspapers employing her or if the territory she’s covering is so well-trod that there simply are hardly any scoops left, but Lorenz seems to have been somewhat defeated by book publishing, struggling to enliven these oft-told stories in her allotted 300 pages.

What’s odd about this is that the book could have been, should have been, Lorenz’s chance to break out of the constraints that have notably chafed her while writing for mainstream outlets. “This book is a personal history in many ways,” she writes, noting her own beginnings in the Tumblr era, but it’s not really personal at all. It mostly feels impersonal, a solidly assembled collection of clips and quotes, without much of a point of view animating it.

Yet Lorenz could have written a much more personal history of the past 20 years of social media. Her own ascent, rocky as it has been, is nothing if not an internet success story, mapping neatly to the argument she’s making in Extremely Online. For what is the tale of Taylor Lorenz but the tale of a creator consistently stretching the bounds of her own platforms, often in ways those platforms’ gatekeepers and guardians struggle to cope with? The toll, she notes in an exceptional passage in the book’s acknowledgments, has been brutal: “I wrote this book almost entirely from bed, as a medically vulnerable person (still!) trying to survive a deadly pandemic while being doxxed, stalked, harassed, and attacked by some of the worst corners of the internet.”

Threading that story through Extremely Online—and the story of “the people I met online who reached out and helped me through those dark days,” who, she says, “reaffirmed my faith in the internet”—would certainly have been difficult and even painful. But it’s surprising and a mite disappointing that Lorenz, canny and ambitious as she always has been, didn’t take on the challenge of squaring her subjects’ dogged faith in the glory of online fame with her own traumatic experience of what that fame can do. The result might have been revelatory, and certainly would have represented her best opportunity to become, like the most successful of the YouTubers and Instagrammers whose stories she tells, bigger than her platform. Nothing would ever have been the same.