INFLUENCE

In an age where nearly all information is a Google or Wiki search away, it's easy to forget that real, first-hand experiences of what the world used to be like are right in our own families and communities. That's the mission of the subreddit r/AskOldPeople. It's a place for members of one generation to get perspective from those who came before. The result has been some deep conversations about p...

Nextdoor is the social network that connects people based on neighborhoods, rather than friend networks or common interests. Getting to know your IRL neighbors sure seems like a good idea. But at times, it combines the two worst things about social media: relative anonymity and real-world consequences. The platform is home to countless petty squabbles and strange behavior that reveal the absurdity...

There's a box of treasure worth millions somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and a global online (and IRL) community is devoted to the search. The treasure was hidden by Forrest Fenn, a collector of antiquities and nature lover, who — after cancer threatened his life in the '80s — decided to have some fun with the wealth he'd accumulated. He wrote a poem full of cryptic, geographic clues that are no...

For thousands of years, God has communicated with humanity via dusty tomes, prophets, and the occasional miracle. But it's 2019, and the Internet is way more efficient for reaching the flock. That's why God has spent the last few years amassing followers on Facebook and Twitter, and smiting hypocrites and blasphemers (aka trolls) with his digital wrath. And if you've noticed that He's a little les...

When fantasy TV shows need an alien or elf to speak a fictional language, most writers make up a few foreign-sounding words to pad the script and move on. But that won't cut it when it comes to Game of Thrones, a show with details as deep as its fandom. So when George R. R. Martin and the show's producers needed to build complete, functional languages for Dothraki riders and Valyrian-speaking slav...

We don't always think of Internet memes as a force for serious social change. But the humor behind image macros and mashup content can be leveraged in the fight against toxic masculinity — with the right talent, of course. Julia Hava has amassed a huge following on Instagram (@binchcity) by turning sexist advertising into hilarious commentary on feminism and mental illness. Alli and Jen talk to Ha...

A growing number of people believe that world governments and other shadow organizations are hiding the truth: that the Earth is not a globe, but a flat disc with a dome of stars above it. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this "mother of all conspiracy theories" is flourishing on the Internet, giving rise to vast networks of YouTubers, podcasters, and social media communities that sp...

While it may feel like books face an existential crisis in the shadow of digital media, reading communities are alive and well in an unlikely social media sphere: Instagram. Showing off what you're reading with a fancy cup of coffee is only a small part of the #bookstagram trend. Insta has become a powerful tool for author discovery (especially for female writers of color), community, accountabili...

On the list of "Things The Internet Is Useful For," lulz rank pretty highly (second only to porn, of course). Online pranks are as old as the ARPANET itself. This April Fools' Day, 2G1P is celebrating internet jokesters by chatting with three developers who can turn your web browser (or a co-worker's, if you're sneaky enough) into a veritable fun house of chortles, guffaws, and confusion. Alli and...

Worldwide and obsessive fandom is nothing new, but it's usually reserved for pop stars, actors, YouTubers, and video games. It's rare for tech CEOs to command such loyalty, but Elon Musk's journey from sickly, bullied child, to stumbling entrepreneur, to rocket-launching world changer is a story that's impossible to ignore. Musk has engendered a global community of superfans who hang on his every...

When TV and radio brought the voices and images of public figures into our very homes, we began to feel kinship with people we've never actually met. But these one-sided "parasocial" relationships have kicked into overdrive with the advent of social media. Now we subscribe to the daily minutia of YouTubers and Instagram influencers under the guise that this format is more honest — more "real" — th...

As we become ever more physically entwined with our technology, and medicine extends our lives beyond anything our ancestors could imagine, we may not be too far away from implanting or genetically manipulating superhuman powers, or even escaping death entirely. If that sounds pretty cool and pretty terrifying at the same time, you're not alone. Alli and Jen talk transhumanist future shock with Dr...

Some people are great at taking flattering selfies and writing witty Tinder taglines. Others, not so much. That's where Meredith Golden comes in. For a fee, she'll take over your profile, learn your voice, and optimize your flirting so you don't screw it up. Then she'll hand the reigns back to you for the IRL date. The system works, and Golden has the record to prove it. But what are the ethics of...

In 2005, Bobby Henderson wrote a letter to the Kansas board of education suggesting that if Christian creationism is taught in schools, so should his theistic view: that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. And so, Pastafarianism was born. The Internet-based social movement spread rapidly as a critique of anti-science fundamentalism, but in some corners of the world like New Zealand, P...

If data-driven matchmaking platforms like Tinder have you down, consider an "old school" online dating method where your friends auction you off in a Facebook group with 300,000 singles who are ready to meme...I mean, mingle. That's how it goes down in "Subtle Asian Dating," a thriving Facebook community where Asian Americans can comfortably dish about their cultural identity and perhaps even meet...

Before Tinder, Grindr, J-Date and Christian Mingle, most of us just had a MySpace page and the dream of finding true love in a sea of extremely emo profile pics. Megan (from the U.S.) and Whitney (from the UK) started a long-distance relationship there, which blossomed against all odds into a international marriage, a TV appearance on Say Yes to the Dress, and a media empire focused on empowering...

Most of the tales that come out of Facebook these days are about the attention sucking qualities that make it terrible for mental health and democracy. But there are shining beacons of hope where the platform has empowered communities that could not exist IRL or elsewhere on the Internet. Ashley Eakin is a filmmaker with an extremely rare bone disease that caused her great insecurity when posting...

If you do enough math, you can generate every combination of letters and numbers possible. Most of the results will be gibberish, but they will also contain Shakespeare, Harry Potter, the unpublished final Game of Thrones book, your 6th grade diary, the actual cure for cancer, and every email and text message anyone has ever sent — or will ever send — ever. Even the words I'm typing right now alre...

Apps like Tinder know a lot about you, but why should they horde all your dating data? In order to settle an argument, one man conducted an exhaustive experiment on the platform to determine if he was more attractive with a beard or without. He shared the results on the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful. He woke up the next morning to thousands of comments about this methodology, graphs, and why his chi...

The History of the Web is a weekly newsletter that began as a place for coders to reminisce about CSS and Bulletin Board software.  But it quickly evolved into a definitive timeline of our shared online history. The story of the Web (the public-facing network of pages that everyone has access to) is arguably the most important sociological endeavor of our time. Alli and Jen chat with Jay Hoffmann,...

Has the internet made things easier for the transgender community? That may depend on which corners of the web you hang out in. For Luna Baker (who transitioned from male-at-birth to female), a variety of digital havens for trans people came and went: Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Facebook groups, etc. Harassment and bullying followed in all of them. She finally arrived at Discord, where strict permi...

Craig Benzine (better known as WheezyWaiter on YouTube) has been making online videos for a living since 2007.  That's a long time to be living and working on the Internet, and when he felt social media was sucking up all his time, he challenged himself to quit for an entire month. His wife Chyna, feeling similar stress, joined the cause. The couple went dark(ish) for 30 days, then resurfaced with...

As media has shifted from broadcast to social, so too have our perceptions of beauty and self-confidence. Plastic surgeons are seeing their patients get younger, and who aspire to look more like their own highly curated selfies, rather than a celebrity or model. What does this say about a culture that is increasingly focused on documenting self image? Alli and Jen speak to Marla Frezza, who modifi...

Esperanto is a language invented 130 years ago with the goal of uniting the world under a simplified common tongue and creating everlasting peace. Spoiler alert: That never happened. But the Internet is rekindling the passion of the global Esperanto community, and millions of people are speaking and learning it through the power of language courses like Duolingo and online communities. Alli and Je...

What if you could 3D print that new lamp, designed by an Internet stranger for free, rather than ordering it from Amazon? When 3D printing tech goes mainstream, it will almost certainly revolutionize ecommerce (and create a whole new kind of online piracy). But until then, we're observing a microcosm of that play out in the tabletop gaming space, where designers are modeling pieces and creating en...