Taylor Lorenz’s Book Looks at Influencers

According to Taylor Lorenz, social media platforms have turned the internet, once a colorless hellscape of bad graphics and words clumped into ungainly shapes called paragraphs, into a wonderland of cute memes and hilarious videos generated by young go-getters whose creativity has been unleashed by idealistic outfits such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. These platforms are saving humanity from “legacy media,” a malevolent cabal of paragraph-peddlers Lorenz has managed to infiltrate with undercover stints as a technology reporter for the Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post.