She Invented Being an Influencer- and was Vilified for it.

September 13, 2023 12:26 PM

Looking back at Julia Allison (SL Rolling Stone- Exerpt from Taylor Lorenz's forthcoming book Extremely Online)
posted by wowenthusiast (11 comments total)

The vicious hatred of female internet pioneers in the early years of this century, Heather Armstrong and Julie Powell also spring to mind immediately, is a really stark example of how the patriarchy will always find willing foot soldiers to do its dirty business.

We had a technology that was presented to the world as an opportunity for human beings to connect in new ways, present themselves in full, be open and free, but the moment it was women doing that and talking about themselves, a misogynistic horde fell on them like the wolf on the fold.

Allison seems remarkably well-adjusted, considering what she went through. Lorenz is absolutely correct that the world owes her an apology. It's too late to apologize to Armstrong and Powell.
posted by Kattullus at 1:20 PM on September 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

Didn't deserve an iota of the hate. Full stop. Nonetheless, while she didn't make online culture worse and more useless and more exploitative--she didn't have the power to do so, her behavior was at worst sometimes mildly unethical, I don't want to heap the sins of late capitalism on her shoulders (also she annoyed Gawker people, which is good)--she was a means by which it became etc., etc. So it's hard for me to look back at her career with fondness, either. Basically, I hope she has a more peaceful life now and gets a chance to apply her talents to contributing, not just hustling.

present themselves in full, be open and free

It's not that I disagree with your sentiment generally, but an influencer is the exact opposite of this, and that's the problem.
posted by praemunire at 1:44 PM on September 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't remember Powell being a complete victim of misogyny. The consensus was that her second memoir was not as appealing as the first, and that may have been misogynist in that at the time readers didn't want darker books written by women. But sometimes a slump just happens with a second book.
posted by kingdead at 1:48 PM on September 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I went to high school* with Julia, and any of my hostile feelings towards her at the time were predicated on my memory of her being a bit of a pest back then and also this.

One thing that Lorenz doesn't touch on in this excerpt, although I hope she does in the book somewhere, is that the earlier web that Julia came crashing into was one that I perceived as valuing anonymity, and only offering esteem or respect on what was done there, on the web. The doing of things out in the real world and dragging them back to your internet cave to share around the firelight for acclaim or recognition was immodest and hazardous at best, assuming you valued your anonymity, and recklessly self aggrandizing to what end, because what the fuck is the internet going to do in response, aside from spew hate, at worst.
She seemed to create a value proposition out of it, which kudos I guess, and laid the groundwork for influencers, whom I now blame for everything from "modern farmhouse" McMansions to onesies for adults.
Thus while she may have been visionary, this is a shit ass vision of the world and one that neither she nor I seem to participate in at all.

*my early internet trained brain really didn't want to include that fact, because it could make it easier to identify me IRL... have I gotten old? unwary? uncaring?
posted by Cold Lurkey at 5:33 PM on September 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Knowing the internet, I don't doubt she was subjected to abuse she did not deserve. But the framing of this article—that she's somehow vindicated now because the thing she did became ubiquitous—is bonkers.

"In 1994, Canter and Siegel were vilified for sending identical advertisements to thousands of Usenet newsgroups, but today spam is everywhere and a multi-million dollar industry."
posted by straight at 6:50 PM on September 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't remember Powell being a complete victim of misogyny.

Is there a percentage threshold misogyny needs to have made to count? Because this horrifies me:

Nearly every article documenting Allison’s rise contained a disturbing level of misogynistic language and tropes. Tech journalists, who were overwhelmingly men, implied that Allison was promiscuous. They used highly gendered language to slut-shame her and question her credibility as an expert on media and technology. She was accused of trying to sleep with the powerful men in tech whom she interviewed or partnered with. Fast Company ran a piece titled “Sometimes Breasts Aren’t Enough, Julia Allison.”

posted by sgranade at 7:30 PM on September 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wondered why I never heard of her... comment feud with Gawker, became well-known on tumblr in 2009. I spent the most time online on livejournal 2005-2008 and then had like five years of working too many hours as a new college grad to spend any time online. Just missed her whole supposed reign.
posted by subdee at 9:41 AM on September 14, 2023

Back around 2010, I had a lot of downtime at work and I used to read style blogs for styles and genders I did not identify with. There was a MPLS blogger whose blog was called "Already Pretty" - very much not my style or gender presentation at all, but she lived around here and it was fun to see her outfits, which were very much aughts "quirky".

And there were people who haaaaaaaated her - like, there were reddit subs about her and gossip blog pages etc etc. It was a whole thing. For no reason! Just a completely anodyne, chatty, inoffensively liberal blogger with a very ordinary though secure and pleasant Minneapolis lifestyle - I mean, not a rich person hob-nobbing with Elon Musk while wearing couture and trampling on service workers, not someone hopped up on the plasma of the poor, etc.

Like, I get that chatty normie-quirky style blogs might not be everyone's cup of tea, I could definitely see that people might not like her style or her clothing advice, but it was all well within the realm of "moderately individual and non-judgemental". She had a cute little blog!

That was what really brought home how deeply misogynist all this stuff is. If a modest little blog like that made people froth at the mouth with misogynist hated, then it really was just about being a woman on the internet, not about any sincere critique of anything.
posted by Frowner at 1:02 PM on September 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

It is sobering how seeing someone get vile abuse for doing a thing can change my opinion from "I hate that thing" to "That thing is not for me, but it seems mostly harmless (or at least no more problematic than the stuff I enjoy). Let people enjoy their thing."

I really shouldn't need internet trolls to get me there.
posted by straight at 2:30 AM on September 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I really dislike influencer culture and I think it's a bad idea. The selfie/social media internet definitely has real benefits, but to me the culture-wide changes in how we view consumption, images, branding, advertising, etc outweigh the good parts, plus there are a lot of other drawbacks. I would prefer that people not enjoy this thing, if it is the thing they enjoy.

But it's our collective responsibility to be self-aware - if everyone is spending a lot of time being frothily misogynist/sexually obsessed with young woman influencers, that's quite bad, and it's not about the matter of influencing. If you don't like influencer culture, why spend a lot of time looking at it? This isn't really on the "don't like, don't read" side of things - you can dislike something quite robustly and think it's bad and strive to discourage it and provide alternatives without cathecting on it and building your life around hating it.

It's like Adbusters - they were always running cover photos with, like, a pouting blond teenage model smearing ice cream on herself as an illustration of how bad consumerism is, and it was pretty clearly about sexual discomfort and misogyny rather than a principled dislike of consumerism. Lots of queasy-sexy pictures of women because, of course, women are the problem, being simultaneously frivolous/stupid/immoral and sexy. Except the old/fat/non-sexy ones who had better stay invisible, of course. Can't live with 'em, can't make a revolutionary society without 'em.

Now, thanks to men's style blogs and the reconfiguration of male consumption of fashion, you can have your misogyny and your trendy products with no intellectual conflict!
posted by Frowner at 6:07 AM on September 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't remember Powell being a complete victim of misogyny.

Is there a percentage threshold misogyny needs to have made to count? Because this horrifies me:

I don't think anyone is arguing that that quote is misogynist; but Powell and Allison are actually different people and that quote is not about Powell?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:34 AM on September 15, 2023 [1 favorite]