When John Podhoretz says something's good, there's no point in not taking a gander.

You gotta look.

So there's this:

This spectacular review by Andrew Stiles of Taylor Lorenz’s book should go down in the annals of great takedowns. https://t.co/V7JacVsYHn

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 29, 2023

Lorenz, recall, is the Washington Post charmer who's supposedly the Voice of the Millennial, the youthquake explosion, the internet 'influencer' of the 'influencers.'

She's also a barftastic leftist, and worse still, a pretty unethical one.

She's the one who famously doxxed the owner of the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, and apparently lied to her editor about consulting her sources. I wrote about her here. Then when Elon Musk bought Twitter and started releasing all the company's secrets, it came to light that she had the censorship bug in her and exerted it with some kind of pull on that site, getting the accounts of genuine men of science such as Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, banned from the platform. "We need to be careful of her," one Twitter exec told another. She's a rich, cossetted whiner who whines a lot and has powerful relatives, as I noted here.

Now she's got a book out, and a book review, and man does it suck.

According to Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon:

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which Lorenz wrote "almost entirely from bed, as a medically vulnerable person (still!) trying to survive a deadly pandemic while being doxxed, stalked, harassed, and attacked by some of the worst corners of the internet," is indeed a chronicle of incoherent youth.

But it is not a worthwhile book. Not in the conventional sense, at least. Future historians (or alien conquerors) may one day consider Extremely Online as a crucial primary text in "The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire." For the vast majority of mentally stable humans living today, Lorenz's "social history of social media" is neither interesting nor comprehensible. A "who?" followed by a "who cares?"

Written in the breathless style of a pre-teen internet (and Adderall) addict composing the Wikipedia entry for "Content Creator," the book bombards us with words and names you've never heard and will wish you hadn't: DigiTour, ROFLCon, A Night to ReMEMEber, lifecasting, ceWEBrities, FameBall, Webutante, Young Klout Gang (not to be confused with the Clout Gang), Keemstar, Dramageddon, Hype House, Drib Crib, Vlog Squad, FaZe Clan, GrapeStory, Lilhuddy, Dax Flame, Pokimane, Fred Figglehorn, WhataDayDerek, Lonelygirl15, Vsauce, Smosh, TheBdonski, among others.

Lorenz considers the social media "revolution"—specifically, the emergence of "influencing" or "content creating" or "going viral" as an increasingly viable path to fame and fortune—to be "the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism," the results of which have been "socially and economically liberating" for "millions who were previously marginalized," including but not limited to teenagers who don't want to get a real job when they grow up.

How revolting. One of the most important points was one of these non-entities encountering Tom Wolfe in his white suit for the first time and exclaiming "He's a brand." Like, barf. What a pointless thing to say about the great man of letters and literature, Tom Wolfe. Stiles points out Wolfe was distinctive in appearance all right, but who the heck cared about that, given that his real fame was in his ability to craft amazing literature of out-of-this-world originality? The man could write. So what he wore was frankly irrelevant. He wore what he liked.

Memo to Lorenz: It's not about the suit.

It's a tremendous smackdown of someone so vapid she should have blown away a long time ago. So long as she is here, though, Stiles does a good job of eating her lunch.

Read the whole thing here.

Image: Twitter screen shot