Janet Jackson’s trauma led to the creation of YouTube. And it says a lot about the internet

Published May 18, 2022, 2:04 AM

WE’RE DOING A LIVE  SHOW in NYC and VIRTUALLY on 5/28! Get tickets: Tangoti.com/live 

 

You probably know about Janet Jackson’s infamous SuperBowl “wardrobe malfunction,” but did you know it inspired the creation of YouTube?

Kimberly Foster, founder of For Harriet discusses how sexism and racism is baked into tech and what it means.

 

Follow ForHarriet on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/forharriet

 

[ In case you’re curious, Bridget’s favorite Janet Jackson song is “Together Again,” but her favorite Janet Jackson deep cut is “Again”  ] 

 

Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter

Want to support the show? (thank you!)

Subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE

Say hello at hello@tangoti.com 

There Are No Girls on the Internet is doing a live show at Caveat in New York City on Friday. You can also attend virtually for wherever you're at in the world. We'll have super cool guests, a meet and greet, and a lot more. Go to Tango dot com slash Live to get tickets. That's t A n g O t I dot com slash Live and I cannot wait to see you there. Our bodies are open source software, right like anybody can dig in, anybody can abstract and it's just for the public good. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I believe in the power of technology. I wouldn't make this podcast if I didn't. But I've also seen the ways that things like misogyny and racism are baked into the foundation of technology in the Internet, and when so much of it plays such a big part in all of our lives, it's something we really need to contend with. And the early days of YouTube are a great example of exactly what I mean. So the story of how YouTube got started is actually a story about how a black woman's trauma would be the inspiration for an entire generation of streaming technology. It can tell us a lot about how we all show up online. My decision to change the super Bowl performance was actually made after the final rehearsal, and unfortunately the whole thing went wrong in the end. So you probably remember the super Bowl halftime show back in two thousand four. Here's a quick summary of what happened at a high point of a historic career that spanned dance, singing, and acting. Pop music sensation Janet Jackson was performing at the super Bowl halftime show alongside surprise guest Justin Timberlake. As timber Lake reached the final line of the song Rock Your Body, which goes gonna have You naked by the end of this song, he pulls off part of Jackson's costume, exposing her breast to a hundred and fifty million viewers for a fraction of a second. I remember the incident well and the complete media firestorm that it created. Janet Jackson was the most searched person for two thousand four and two thousand five, and representatives from the television recording device TiVo said that not only was the incident the most replayed moment in the entire history of the device, but it also drove more than twenty people to subscribe to TiVo. Now what I remember the clearest about this incident is Janet herself talking about how traumatic it was for her. It's truly embarrassing to know that ninety million people saw my breast and then to see it blown up on the internet the size of the computer screen. There are much worse things in the world, and for this to be such a focus, I don't understand, she told USA Today. This moment and our collective reaction to it revealed a lot about intersecting issues that we sometimes have trouble talking about gender, race, sexuality, all unfolding against a media climate ready and willing to publicly denigrate a black woman. To better understand this moment, how it led to the creation of YouTube, and what it says about our current internet landscape for black women and everybody, I turned to Kimberly Foster. My name is Kimberly Foster. I am a writer, editor, content creator, cultural critic, a whole bunch of things. Kimberly has been unpacking black feminist thought online for over a decade with her digital community for black women called for Harriet. You really have built your own lane using technology and digital media and the Internet with for Harriet. And I know that this really came up at a time where there wasn't really a lot of spaces to get black feminist thought online. I would love to know how that came to be, Like how you came to be this, this woman who kind of made your own lane having an opinion on the Internet. And what does it feel like to be such an earlier originator of black feminist online discourse? Oh well, first of all, that's so nice. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I think I've always been obsessed with the Internet ever since I can remember. We first got on the Internet when I was in kindergarten and my mom is an engineer, so she was so pro technology and so pro computers and exploration. She actually gave me my first HTML book and it's like have fun, go crazy, And so ever since I was in elementary school, I've just been like, what is this? And I learned that you can connect to people and create your own spaces and create your own websites. And as I got older, I was like oh wait, like I can have my own magazine, I can have my own website where it's all my thoughts and I have complete control. And so I was all in on that in my teenage years, blogging and on the message for and all of that. And then I went to college and I developed a very strong political ideology. In college, I discovered black feminism, and so I wanted to figure out a way to meld my obsession with the Internet, my desire to share my unique viewpoints and my own kimberly owned space on the Internet, with this burgeoning political ideology that meant a lot to me. And so I came up with the idea for for Harriet, which would be a black feminist digital community where black women who thought like me. Because of course, all black women aren't progressive, all black women aren't feminists. I wanted to create a congregating space where we could just talk about our lives and our experiences and our politics and the childs and tribulations, especially as a straight woman of dealing with men, you know. And so junior year in college, I I launched this space. Since there's been no looking back since then you were at Harvard, right, I was did you see someone who looked like you doing this, Like it would have never occurred to me in college to build my own space online using the internet for for other black women who felt like me, And how did my same perspectives? Was there did you? Because there just wasn't really anybody doing that. The only thing I can think of is um Kadijia from living single having her own magazine. But we didn't really see that. Was there something that made you think like, oh, I can do this, or this is a pathway for me, or were you just blazing your own blazing your own trail. Oh I'm so glad that you asked this question because I always say that citation is a fundamental part of a black feminist ethics. So I'm so excited I get to shout these people out. So when I first decided that I wanted to make for Harriet, I was starting to creep into black feminist spaces online and they did exist. There are a couple that I love of the Feminist Wire, which was a great collective of black feminist scholars in the academy, and the Krunk Feminist Collective, which was another assembly of black feminist women who were academics my viewpoint, I felt like was a little bit different because I was still so young. I was still trying to figure it out, and I wanted to create a way to bridge the critical, path breaking work that these women were doing in the academy, which I mean I was still in college with some of the pop culture stuff that I love, which is some of the normal everyday experiences of women who maybe wouldn't necessarily identify with feminism, but knew, like this ship is fucked up, when we gotta do something else. YouTube was initially started as a dating app where users could upload videos of themselves talking about what they're looking for in a partner, but it wasn't really working. Co found er Joeed Kareem told south By Southwest that they actually had to find women on Craigslist and offer them twenty dollars to upload videos of themselves to YouTube, but even with that cash incentive, people just really weren't interested, so the co founders had to go back to the drawing board. Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance happened in two thousand four, and about a year later, YouTube's co founders were talking about wanting to watch it again, but they couldn't back in two thousand five, there was really no way to watch the incident or really any online content on demand online because this was before streaming video and also predates what we think of as viral videos. Unless you happen to be recording it on TiVo or on an old school DCR, there kind of wasn't a way to see it. Kareem told USA Today. They thought, wouldn't it be great if people could see and share the video of the incident whenever they wanted, And with this, the desire to see and shared and consume Janet Jackson's breast on demand YouTube was born a year later. I'm at Janet Jackson super Fan was one of my first concerts, and so one of the things that that people I think don't really know a lot about is the way that this one traumatic moment in her life really did shape a lot of what it means to show up online. And so you talked about the way that YouTube was really inspired by at her wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl? Can you talk to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, So, I too, am a Janet Jackson stand shout out to my mother. When I was twelve years old, she took me to see the alf You Tour, which actually was a little a little risk at some risking parts in it. But I'm so glad that she did that because it completely just opened up my mind and just made me just hone in on Janet as the originator, the queen of pop. Do not debate me, um, and so I was really excited for the two part documentary UM that she had a hand in because she's been so historically private. And of course I watched the documentary and then there's all of this commentary about it, and that commentary led me to go down all of these little rabbit holes and learn more about the incident nipplegate, and so I read, I mean, I watched the New York Times little um is it a you know this little I hesitate to call it documentary, it's like an exploration of the incident, watched all kinds of YouTube videos, listen to podcasts about it, and I came away feeling differently. But really what struck me was how the fearer over this incident, the desire for people to see Janet Jackson's exposed nipple, inspired these and like science science of um technology to like create this technology. So that people could watch it like YouTube, right, So the founders of YouTube were like, hey, we need to create a platform where like people can see this lady's boob on demand. And then they're like, okay, well, let's dedicate our resources to creating this platform where people can see this woman's boob on demand, despite the fact that her entire life was derailed because of people's desire, you know, like the simultaneous desire and repulsion from her boom. I thought, I felt like that was really interesting. And of course YouTube blows up and it's now, what is it the second largest search engine in the world. And then Netflix, you know, the founder of or one of the heads of Netflix, was like, oh, okay, there's a there's a market for streaming, so let's go all in on the streaming market that YouTube proved was viable. So all of this comes from the desire, a very distinct desire for people to see this one particular moment that ultimately derailed Janet Jackson's career and changed her life. And it's so unfortunate for me, as Janet Jackson stand that it's almost like you can't even mentioned Janet without talking about nipplegate. When in reality, she's so much more than that. But of course, as black women, whenever there's an opportunity, we're always going to be reduced, not only to our most humiliating moments, what we're going to be reduced down to our body parts. And so I thought it was really important to note that that moment created these technologies that now we're spending all of our time on. Yeah, I think that you put that so well, and I do want to note I think that when people want to disrespect and dinnigrade Janet, they always say, oh, she did that at the super Bowl because she her career was in the gutter and she was just trying to get people talking about her. If your career is in the gutter, you're not performing at the super Bowl. Like her, her career was massively successful way before that. You know, this idea that she was like a nobody who was just trying to get attention on this is something I hate when people say that because it's just so verifiably false. I mean, this is the thing. And not to get me off of my Janet stand back, but I'm so glad that that documentary highlighted the number of records that Janet Jackson broke throughout her career. At one point she had the biggest she signed the biggest recording deal ever for a woman in pop music ever black white, like other ever, she was it. There was like she had two albums where there was like six top ten singles, like this is a huge artists selling out concerts all around the world. Like it's easy for us to forget, particularly when it comes to black women's accomplishments, how enormous they are. But Janet was it. And so yes, I so agree with you that the idea that she was somehow floundering or that she had to do this because she needed money or attention or whatever, like she was the spectacle, Like she was it. She was if I'm right there with you, you know, why do you think that it is not like you were talking earlier about how things like Netflix and YouTube, but they're their websites that we use, our technologies that we use, they're commonplace, we use them all the time. Why do you think the way that a black woman's trauma was sort of the foundation for these things that go on to be so ubiquitous in all of our lives. Why is that erased? Why do you think that's not a common knowledge. I think because black women's bodies, in particular in our traumas, generally are seen as public property. There is generally a sense of entitlement, like we should just be happy to give these things over, to sacrifice them that they are, you know, like our bodies are like open source software, right, like anybody can dig in, anybody can extract, and it's just for the public good. And so there's no, like you mentioned, thought given to how is the person you're extracting from being harmed by this? In Janet's case, and obviously historically, I mean that goes that's centuries. Let's take a quick breaker back. I've seen the ways that misogyny and massogy noire, the way that sexism and racism intersect to oppress Black women specifically, is baked into technology. And it's not surprising to me given how many technological innovations were inspired by sexism. For instance, back in two thousands three, Harvard University student named Mark Zuckerbird made face mash, a social media platform to rate women on their looks. Here's what zuck himself had to say, I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even ten pm and it's a Tuesday night. The Kirkland Dorm Facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous pictures. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and if people vote on which is more attractive. The site was taken down by Harvard and a year later Facebook was born. So we already know the world is full of things like classism, eble iss um, sexism, racism, and all the other isms that keep us from being free. And it's really tempting to be hopeful and think that technology won't just replicate these harmful oppressions, but Kimberly says it takes intentional un learning and vigilance to really see how these systems show up and intercept, and if tech leaders are unable or unwilling to do this work, they'll just end up creating technologies that recreate these same harmful systems. I believe massa genique, specifically massogyn noir like shout out to Moya Bailey, is baked into the foundation of so much technology and so much of the experience of being on the Internet. And I really see this idea that YouTube was founded on this trauma that a black woman experienced so publicly is a great example of that. And you know, do you agree with this, Like, what do you think about that? I think that the foundations of our society are built off of misogyn noire, and because people are not doing the work to actively unlearn it or to actively wrestle with it or deal with their biases, that it creeps into every facet of our society. And despite the fact that people who work in technology believe themselves to be particularly progressive and forward thinking, of course it seeps into those worlds as well. And so if we're not having conversations constantly about hey, you are perpetuating massogyn noir right now, it's it's just gonna be there. I mean, it's it's baked into the cake, it's baked into to our psyches. So yeah, it's it's pretty This is depressing, but it feels like an inevitability because most people aren't doing that work. So you so you see technology as kind of amplifying and elevating this massage and noir that's just already in society. And so when you build something online or when you use technology to build something and you don't intentionally work to dismantle that or unlearn that or unpack that, you are simply baking that same massage no more into whatever you're designing. Absolutely, and it's massagyn noir and all sorts of other biases homophobia, transphobia, classism, it's all of that. We're just it's easy to ignore if you don't have to grapple with it every day. Yeah, and I mean, I feel like I see this. I'm like you. I love the Internet. I grew up on the internet. The Internet is, you know, my hometown in a lot of ways. And I am not really on it like I used to be. I'm not on social media like I used to be. And one of the reasons why is that I just see the ways that disrespecting black women, fat women, queer black youth will always be a winning strategy on social media. This is one of the more exhausting parts of showing up online as a black woman. Putting us down will always drive engagement because platforms are built without intentionally interrogating and unpacking things like racism and sexism, and even more broadly, if you've ever felt like you see more more negative, divisive, extreme more inflammatory content on your feed other than positive, thoughtful content. You are absolutely right. Researchers at Harvard analyze one tweets and found that negativity was about more prevalence and positivity, and that negative tweets engaged more users, and a similar yales that eat found that social media platforms like Twitter amplify expressions of moral outrage over time because users learn the language of outrage gets rewarded with an increased number of likes and shares. And I see this a lot on Twitter, where people will tweet inflammatory things specifically because they know it will be hard for the rest of us to avoid engaging with it. I see it in the way that like if you follow some of these accounts on places like Instagram, where they'll they'll have a post where it's like a picture of a black woman or particularly a picture of like a black queer child, right, and they'll post it knowing full well what they are doing, knowing full well that that is going to drive engagement. And it has this this kind of the sheen of plausible deniability where they're not saying anything, they're simply posting a picture of a queer black child, and you know, asking people what they think. And I find that to be such an indication of the ways that social media platforms and digital platforms will always be able to count on disrespecting and denigrating marginalized people for engagement, and in fact that engagement is incentivized and it's baked into the experience of using some of these platforms. Yeah, it's an incredibly toxic cycle. The Internet, largely in social media platforms in particular, are fueled by outrage and abuse. Abuse happens, we see it, we experience it, we're traumatized, and then of course people are outraged, and that is the engagement circle, you know. So it's abuse after abuse after abuse. You're trying to scold somebody, express your distaste, express your scorn, and you're typing your little fingers away. Um you might even you know, this is a thing that I'm not sure we've reconnected with, like your reposting abuse of content to say this is abuses. So it just travels for there in further in the outrage fuels the comments and the response videos and the posts, and we're all really and truly in a very um a horrible, I think psychologically really damaging cycle with how these platforms are are set up. Oh absolutely. I mean I I used to when I first got on TikTok, I used to follow a lot of creators who their whole thing was and and no shade of these people. I'm not saying that like they're bad people, but it just wasn't for me. Their whole thing would be you know, look at this video of someone being racist, like but like and you know, I guess I just and I would, I would engage with these videos, but they would leave me feeling so empty and so bad and so sort of distrustful. And it just reinforced this idea of you know, I can't trust them when I go outside, I can't trust people outside, I can't trust my neighbors. Like it really fueled been kind of scary in me, I guess, and it made me realize I want more, Like I want more from platforms. I want to be offered more than outrage and abuse and disrespect and detigration. Can't we have better conversations and better and better experiences online? It seems like maybe we can't anymore. Oh, I know people hate the phrase safe spaces. I know that that's become kind of like a boogeyman, like the word woke has. But I do think that increasingly people are trying to forge spaces where they're not going to be inundated with trauma and awfulness and abuse of content all the time. I think that is one of the reasons why platforms like discord have blown up over the past eighteen months. I know, for me, I spend a lot of time on private communities like the Patreon community, which is hard, right because, as I understand, you're always erecting barriers when you are putting things behind a paywall. Um. But for my own mental health, for my own well being as a public person who has experienced so much abuse, I just have felt better by saying, Okay, I'm just not going to have this conversation out in the big world, out on the big Internet. We're going to keep it on the discord. We're gonna keep it on the Patreon, where maybe I can't trust all of the people who are there because I don't know some bad actors make it in, but there's some filters, and I feel like that's increasingly what's happening. People are moving from the open Internet, open platforms, to Facebook groups, to discords, to patreons to private communities. Yeah, I've definitely noticed that. I mean, I still have a Facebook, I bare use it, and the only reason that I am there at all is because of private Facebook groups. It's the only thing that keeps me there. And it's so interesting how we have really moved toward kind of like thinking about our Internet experiences and spaces as more like camp fires, like, oh, we're gonna curate who comes, We're all going to have this shared interest and that's what we're going to gather around, as opposed to just you know, public forms. Anybody come on in. And you know, I know that you've talked quite a bit about this idea of scale and the way that that trying to grow things to be the biggest, biggest, biggest thing kind of will always be at odds with it's like feelings like care and and and intention and so it seems like one of those things where it's like, if you're doing something behind a paywall, yeah, maybe it will never be the biggest community with everybody there where you're making tons of money, and maybe that's okay. Maybe maybe being able to have a little bit more intentionality around the communities that you build and have a little bit more of control over it in that way, Maybe that's okay. And maybe not maybe going into building these spaces with a with a goal that is not making them as a big or as powerful or as lucrative as they can be, maybe that's okay. Yeah, I mean you mentioned incentives earlier, and really the incentive structures for everybody, including creators, are so messed up. And so I agree with you that there are things that I'm just not gonna do anymore. I'm not gonna make the video about look at this horrible thing that just happened, look at this black woman being abused. Let's be I. I am not in that space anymore. It's just too harmful to me. Like I just I can't deal with it anymore. But I understand that so many creators understand. They see that that's where the engagement is, which means that's where the money is. And it is already so difficult as a creator, particularly as a black creator, to make a living. I see what people are doing when they're doing that. I'm speaking from a place of extreme privilege when I say I can opt out of doing that stuff now because I've built up such a strong supportive community of people who are saying, Kim, I value your voice. So I want to be in the community where we can talk more intimately about things that Sometimes they are traumatic, sometimes they are um hard to deal with. Sometimes we are going deep on misogyn noir and all sorts of other oppressions. But there's fundamentally an ethic of care in all of those conversations. I am so conscientious about how I facilitate those discussions, how I participate in them, who was brought into them. And that's really not possible when your only your only goal is to get bigger, When your only goal is to get more views, more followers, more eyeballs. Everybody is coming to the conversation and a lot of those people are coming to it with malice. And I feel so much empathy for the people who are stuck in that cycle because the Internet is just not created for people to thrive and take care of their mental health. That is so true, And I should just say the research is very clear that most social media platforms really do amplify it incentivize uh, you know, extremist content, inflammatory content, outrageous content that is negative over content that is thoughtful, that is nuanced, and so I think what you just described it, it's it's like a it's like a cycle where platforms are have have incentivized that kind of content and they're making money off of it, and it just keeps us all, you know, like you said, stuck in this cycle that is not prioritizing care more after a quick break, So, if you've ever wondered I wonder what Bridget is up to when she's not making the podcast that, I have great news for you. We just launched our brand new newsletter where I'm gonna be writing about things I'm paying attention to online, interesting stories that didn't make it to the podcast, and a whole lot more. I promise you will never spam you. You can subscribe to our newsletter at Tanodi dot com slash newsletter and it's gonna be like a useful newsletter. I promise you can also support the show by checking out our merch store at tangoti dot com slash store. Let's get right back into it. How do you think we get to a place where platforms and online spaces are not built on things like disrespect or you know, outrageousness or being inflammatory or use but can actually feel like care, you know, like the space that you've built, or should we just be focused on, you know, building our own ship. As I know that you are a big advocate for man. People ask me this all the time. I think that one good place to start this is a beginning and not the end is I think that platforms need to be very serious about paying creators better, giving out money, giving out grants, paying creators. I mean, even when they do start to offer these incentives, like Instagram now has started offering incentives for reels and content and all of that, it's so little money or it's so there's no rhyme or reason to how you get paid and how much you get paid. If there was transparency around that, I think that that would be really, really helpful. But honestly, I don't think that we're ever going to get equity or anything that even looks like justice from any of the platforms that we have right now. I think that the sea word is coming capitalism and the goals and desires of these platforms are irreconcilable with the goal and the need for content creators, specifically marginalized content creators, to take care of themselves, to be able to take breaks to not have to exploit every single abuse in offense. I just don't see I just don't see the possibility for that at this time. I think it's like tear it all down and try again. I mean, that's so often the answer when we ask these big questions recognizing that it's systemic, it's institutional, right, It's like we need completely new paradigms and new systems or something that. You know, I definitely advocate for people, particularly marginalized creators, but really anybody to take breaks when they need it from the Internet all of that. But you can't take breaks or like self care your way out of something that is structural. And so I think sometimes it's an unsatisfying answer that like, oh, yeah, we need to brun it all down to start again. But that's the answer. Yeah. I mean, I'm not trying to bullshit people, right, Like I understand that Twitter is always going to be about trying to optimize profits for shareholders. I understand that Meta is always going to be about trying to get the most advertising dollars, trying to get the most screen time, right, the most daily active users. That's not going to change. So we just gotta be honest about what we're working with Here, got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 292 clip(s)