‘Facebook F—ed Up’: Taylor Lorenz Tells the Untold History of the Internet in Upcoming Book ‘Extremely Online’

variety.com:

Rachel Seo “I want to tell the stories that have been written out of history by Silicon Valley,” says Taylor Lorenz. In her forthcoming book, “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Power and Influence on the Internet,” Lorenz — a technology and digital culture columnist for the Washington Post — chronicles what she describes as a “history of the social internet.” Starting with the blogging boom of the early 2000s and ending with the current TikTok era, Lorenz covers everything from the surpassing influence of early aughts mommy bloggers to MySpace to the rise and fall of Vine, pulling seemingly disparate stories from different platforms into a cohesive narrative about the construction of social media as we know it today.

Ahead of the book’s release on Oct. 3, Lorenz chatted with Variety about what led her to write “Extremely Online,” TikTok’s disruptive influence in Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes drama of Vine’s downfall and why “Facebook really fumbled the bag.” What previously untold story about the internet were you trying to tell with this book? There’s been a lot of phenomenal books written about the corporate side of social media.

I loved Nick Bilton’s “Hatching Twitter,” Sarah Frier’s “No Filter,” Mark Bergen’s “Like, Comment, Subscribe.” These are all seminal books about the different platforms, and, obviously, the hundred Facebook books that we have in the world.

They all tell the story of the rise of social media through the lens of specific platforms and really the corporate — they get into the user side a little bit — but it’s mostly these corporate tales.