“Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.”

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. Gates had been challenged by Mark Zuckerberg, who’d been challenged by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with whom Zuckerberg had appeared on Oprah a few years prior to announce a $100 million donation to Newark schools. 

By the time Musk tweeted out a video of his kids drenching him with their own makeshift ice bucket gizmo a day after Gates, the challenge had already reached tens of millions of people worldwide. Among the participants were Jeff Bezos, Justin Bieber, David Lynch — and Donald Trump.

As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. 

In the early 2010s, platforms like Facebook “actually had the potential to be this century’s agora, a marketplace of ideas,” said Asha Curran, who co-founded GivingTuesday, a philanthropic counterweight to Black Friday, in 2012. “The social media environment wasn’t this sort of existential threat to our mental health and our democracy and our isolation that it is now.”

But it wasn’t just a different era for social media. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99 percent alike, and Bill Gates — alongside both his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett — was influencer number one. In 2010, the Gateses and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the ultra-wealthy to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. At the campaign’s peak, about one in seven American billionaires — including Musk, Zuckerberg, and a broad swath of the country’s rising tech billionaire class — pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. Together, they promised to usher in a new golden age of philanthropy.

They also aimed to inspire giving from Americans of more modest means, who flocked to viral clicktivism campaigns while sporting TOMS shoes and (PRODUCT)RED iPod nanos. The idea was seductive: You too could help save the world while making a show of your generosity. 

Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. 

For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad.

It’s no wonder today’s youths yearn for the hopecore, the millennial optimism, of the early 2010s, that mediascape of messy buns, post-recession electropop, and sincere posting about causes everyone cared about for a week or two. The internet’s Earnest Era propelled a culture of giving even among billionaires, who shared a fear of missing out on the next hashtag cause. But today’s more fractured internet has kneecapped that positivity. To some degree, it made even the idea of trying to save the world cringe. The problem is not so much a giving crisis, as it is an attention crisis, one that’s been exacerbated by rising inequality and the decline of generosity as a collective cultural value, the kind of virtue worth signaling. 

“For a while, you almost needed to pick a charity as part of your online persona,” said Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned founder of Charity: Water, a celebrity darling back when “it was really cool” to give in the early 2010s. He has struggled to fundraise in recent years. “It’s not on trend. It’s not what people are doing. It phased out. The cycle ended.”

I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad

2010 was a transformative year for generosity for two important reasons: The economy had passed through the very worst of the Great Recession, and for the very first time, more Americans were about to be on social media than off of it. 

Surveys of young people in the early 2010s showed that they were stubbornly, discordantly optimistic despite graduating into underemployment.

One of those millennials was Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 was named Time’s person of the year at 26 years old for building a platform “fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels.”

Social media made the world feel smaller. When a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January of that year, it became the first major live-tweeted natural disaster. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean were among those soliciting their followers for donations in the aftermath of the quake. Within a week, Jean’s own charity raised $2 million and the Red Cross raised $8 million. Celebrities released a “We Are the World” charity cover, and Americans ultimately gave about 15.3 percent more to international aid that year than they did the year prior. 

People who donated told their friends about it — publicly, online — and they told their friends about it in turn, in a charitable daisy chain that thrived under newly digitized social pressures. If you told the internet about your good deed, you’d look cool. If you were the only one of your friends who didn’t, well, you’d look like a bit of a jerk, in a much more visible way than in the past. 

Then, on June 16, 2010, news broke of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s plan to ask the nation’s billionaires to commit to giving away half of their fortunes. One week later, the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song “Billionaire” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was an ode to getting rich not just to get rich, but to give it all away: “Not a single tummy around me would know what hungry was, eatin’ good, sleepin’ soundly.” 

By 2014, the Giving Pledge had 130 signatories, amounting to one in seven of the country’s billionaires, the majority of whom shared their motivations for joining in public letters online.

“People signed it because it was the cool thing to do,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog that advocates for progressive practices in the philanthropic sector.

The Giving Pledge was perhaps the single biggest manifestation of philanthro-capitalism, or the idea that “rich people can save the world” by applying their business acumen to charitable causes, was “all the rage” at the time, he said. While the pledge was not legally binding — and came with few expectations — most signatories “honestly believed they were going to live up to the terms.”

While the rest of the world heaped praise on the Pledgers, Dorfman wrote a series of articles in the Huffington Post critiquing the Giving Pledge when it was first announced. “I remember thinking this is insane. Everybody thinks this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread and it’s just not,” he told me recently. At the time, he believed that the way billionaires gave was too slow and self-serving to actually make a dent in serious global problems. “There’s no way it can possibly make that much of a difference.”

How to #SaveTheWorld, one hashtag at a time

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only millennial to believe he could save the world. 

Facebook, and other platforms like it, helped inspire a boom in viral kindness and giving campaigns in the early 2010s. While celebrities often acted as superspreaders — some, like Justin Bieber, signed a “Hollywood Pledge” modeled after the Giving Pledge in 2011— social media was not the influencer-dominated, algorithmized cesspool it is today.

When Curran helped launch GivingTuesday in 2012, “it immediately crossed what today we would think of as algorithmic bubbles,” she said. The White House blogged about it, and #GivingTuesday quickly became a top trending topic on Twitter. That first year, the hashtag raised at least $10 million for charity in 24 hours, a 53 percent spike from the year prior. 

“The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

Asha Curran, GivingTuesday

“We were catching a wave,” Curran said. “The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

That same year, over 1 million men grew mustaches — and raised over $100 million — for Movember’s annual men’s health awareness campaign, driven in part by a PSA starring the mustachioed actor Nick Offerman. The charity Invisible Children went viral for its 30-minute YouTube video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, kindling the #Kony2012 craze, a campaign now chiefly remembered for being offensive and ineffective. 

Few charities mastered social media quite as successfully as Charity: Water, which gained a huge following in part by flying tech entrepreneurs to Ethiopia and convincing celebrities to share their birthday fundraisers. Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith kicked off the trend in 2010, and a year later Justin Bieber asked his Beliebers to donate $17 each for his 17th birthday. By 2013, Charity: Water had raised over $100 million from thousands of people online, enough to build over 8,000 wells and other clean water projects. 

“The beauty was the average birthday fundraiser brought in 10 of their friends and family,” Harrison said. “It almost had an implied virality, and it cost us nothing.” 

By the time a majority of Americans had smartphones in 2013, the internet was being flooded with selfies and short video trends. (Rest in six seconds of peace, Vine.) The Norwegian Army danced to the Harlem Shake in the snow. And golfers were drenching themselves with cold water as a way to bring attention to their favorite charities online. 

In July 2014, one of those golfers, a man named Chris Kennedy, poured a bucket of ice water on his head for the ALS Association, and then challenged his cousin, whose husband had the disease. She accepted, and the videos began pulsating through her social networks until they reached Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both young ALS advocates.

From there, “it just continued to snowball,” said Brian Frederick, who the ALS Association brought on to help manage the trend. Over 17 million people participated that summer. “There was a period in August where for eight straight days, we were raising over $10 million a day.” The association had to reserve an entire office in its headquarters just to store all of the checks that people were sending in. 

The association raised about $115 million in just eight weeks, money that helped fund 130 research projects in 12 different countries. But while social media moves at light speed, medical research is a bit slower. Only in recent years have ALS patients begun to see breakthroughs in treatment from that enormous infusion of funding for a rare disease that most Americans had never heard of before 2014. By the time their donations started to pay off, most of them had likely forgotten whatever they’d once known about the disease.

“It dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS. It led to new genes being discovered, new research collaborations, new treatments in the pipeline,” said Frederick, but for most people who soaked themselves with icy water that summer, “that was just a one-time thing for them. They’ll never know that they really did make a difference.”

When generosity became cringe

The ice bucket challenge was the last real do-gooder social media trend of its kind. 

A week after it started coursing through the internet, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, drawing an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media. Both the #IceBucketChallenge and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the hashtag most associated with the protests that followed Brown’s killing, proliferated explosively and “almost simultaneously” across the internet, the writer Jia Tolentino noted at the time, yet they spread “entirely discreetly: twinned channels of wildfire blazing through quadrants of your attention that barely touch.”

Cracks were beginning to show in an internet that would soon become irrevocably siloed, one where digital attention, which felt so boundless and empowering earlier that decade, would come to feel like a precious commodity, monetized and increasingly stretched thin. With the Ferguson protests, that shift coincided with a massive political awakening and major domestic unrest and anger. To some corners of the internet, the performance of mass apolitical acts of generosity began to feel like an irreconcilable distraction in a competition for finite attention. 

As a result, the viral monoculture of the early 2010s fractured, giving way to an internet driven less by personal connections and more by hyper-targeted algorithms designed to keep you scrolling. “I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore,” Ethan Zuckerman, a digital media scholar and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. “They feel trapped by them. They feel like they want to escape these tools.” 

The vibe shifted, and the internet’s new feeds rarely rewarded the kind of mass earnestness that drove engagement on early social media platforms.

“I wish that I had known that it was the last time so that I could have marked it in my mind,” Curran said. “I’m not sure that a Giving Tuesday could work if it were launched today.” 

“I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore. They feel trapped by them.”

Ethan Zuckerman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

That’s not to say that people aren’t generous anymore. But they are significantly less likely to give to charity than they used to: Fewer than half of American households donate at all these days, down from 66 percent in 2000. Those who do give give an average of 1.2 percent of their income, down from nearly 2 percent in 2017. 

America’s richest families have given more to charity in total dollars over the past decade — enough, in fact, to make up for the decline in everyday donors and then some. But as a percentage of their ballooning wealth, most billionaires — including those who signed the Giving Pledge — appear to be giving less to charity than they used to. 

Rising inequality — and the belief that the wealthier should donate instead — explains part of this decline for everyday Americans, among other factors. But it also reflects a broader pattern in which Americans have largely moved away from performing their giving, or earnestness more broadly, at least online. It’s just not swaggy anymore; it doesn’t give you the insane aura that it used to. 

“These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

Scott Harrison, Charity: water

“It’s not in my feed. You’re not getting hit up for charities from your friends the same way you were,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you the last celebrity that was in my feed asking me to give to their favorite charity, it’s been years. They are selling lipstick. They are selling protein powders. These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

GivingTuesday is actually a much bigger movement today than it was in 2012, raising about $4 billion last year, but it’s no longer primarily a social media phenomenon. “Neighbor-to-neighbor generosity is more important than ever because that’s the way you escape the algorithmic bubble,” Curran said. “You almost have to get offline entirely.” Americans who do give online increasingly do so through ever more individualized channels like GoFundMe, which got its start in 2010, but has exploded in popularity in recent years. More than three-quarters of Americans say they believe that political polarization has made people more reluctant to give, and 60 percent said they’ve personally shied away from charitable activities that may involve people with opposing political views. In the absence of a shared civic culture, deeply siloed — and often distrusted — platforms like GoFundMe have become many Americans’ chosen way to give.

And where have the billionaires been? For the most part, accumulating wealth far faster than they gave it away. Zuckerberg, who once critiqued philanthropists for waiting until old age to fork up their fortunes, has seen his wealth increase by over 4,000 percent since signing the Giving Pledge, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. That $100 million for Newark schools that he announced on Oprah to such fanfare in 2010? It’s now widely regarded as a colossal failure built on a foundation of philanthro-capitalist buzzwords instead of actual community needs. A few weeks after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration and appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic initiative announced that it would stop funding causes like education reform and social justice last year. While Zuckerberg gives much more in total charity today than he did 15 years ago, he gives far less as a percentage of his wealth. Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Newark in 2010, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of his net worth at the time. Last year, he and his wife donated $608 million, but it amounted to just 0.3 percent of his now gargantuan fortune.

In recent years, a cadre of right-wing billionaires led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has also begun to actively denigrate the Pledge for what they see as a left-wing bias, despite the fact that it has always been intentionally apolitical. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel, who accused the Pledge of being an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club,” told the New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join,” he said, claiming that some Pledgers feel “blackmailed” to stay on the list once they sign.

As the rest of America has stratified and become more partisan, so too have the nation’s billionaires. And apolitical promises, like sheer generosity itself, just don’t hold the same allure that they used to. 

“Peter Thiel used to be an outlier, but now many tech billionaires are coming together around this radical anti-social” worldview, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires. “They’re opting out of the social institutions that the rest of us depend on.”

You say performative like it’s a bad thing

Craig Newmark is not like those other tech billionaires. The founder of Craigslist is not and has never been a billionaire at all, he says, despite what Forbes might have to say about it. 

“I am a peasant at heart,” he told me, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times defending the Pledge against its partisan detractors. “My favorite luxury at my age is a walk-in shower with grab bars.” 

Newmark is a new recruit, having only signed the Giving Pledge himself last December. He was already a prolific philanthropist, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to military families, cybersecurity, pigeon rescue, and my alma mater. So why add his name now? 

“It seemed to me that signing up for it would be funny,” he said, referring to the “absurd” idea that a “nerd patient zero” like himself could rub shoulders in an elite philanthropy club. “Funny is highly motivating for me. I know I’m not as funny as I think I am, but given the toxicity of our culture these days, anything funny is highly welcome.”

When I pressed him, Newmark conceded that signing the Pledge was also his way of “putting a stake in the ground.” Seeing other billionaires pull away from giving now is “disappointing,” he said, “because the world needs people who have too much money to pitch in” to help improve people’s lives at a time of vast inequality. “There are Americans who are going hungry,” he said, and “that kind of pisses me off.”

But primarily, he insists, he’s just trying to be funny. “We all need positive entertainment these days.”

And maybe that’s the point, because the Giving Pledge, like the ice bucket challenge and #Movember, was built on performance. Newmark is now engaging in that performance with the kind of wry, ironic humor befitting of today’s internet culture, rather than the gravitas and sincerity of the Pledge’s early years. But it was always, to some extent, a performative spectacle. While some signatories have turned out to be extraordinarily generous — MacKenzie Scott and Laura and John Arnold come to mind — there’s little evidence that the Pledge has accelerated their giving or made the ultra-wealthy more charitable as a cohort. 

Having skimmed through dozens of early Pledger letters, I’ve found that many claimed to have already been well on their way to giving it all away prior to making a public commitment. “Until now, I have done this giving quietly,” wrote Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in 2010. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to,” he wrote, for the purpose of “‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

The Pledge’s original 2010 signatories — including Gates and Zuckerberg —  have donated about $206 billion as of last year, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, most of which went into their private foundations and DAFs, which slowly dole out grants to charity. The Arnolds are the only living original signatories to have given away enough to fulfil their Pledge, and of the 22 Pledgers who have died since 2010, only eight fulfilled their promise to give away at least half of their wealth during their respective lifetimes or in their wills. At the rate that Musk and Ellison are going — they’ve given away 0.06 percent and 0.03 percent of their wealth, respectively, according to Forbes — it seems unlikely that today’s living Pledgers will fare much better. And they’re in good company. Four in five of the wealthiest 400 Americans have given away less than 5 percent of their fortunes as of last year, most under 1 percent.  

Likewise, only about one-fifth of those who participated in the ice bucket challenge actually donated to the fight against ALS. The one in five who did donate gave about $220 million to ALS worldwide, and $115 million to the ALS Association, which raised about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior. While there was a genuine desire to help people through the trend, at the same time, Frederick said, the majority of people were “just doing what their friends were doing.” 

@brookemonk_

The #uscicebucketchallange is rasing awareness for such an important topic. Please don’t be afraid to speak up 🫶 You have 24hrs @Cassie @leah halton @Sam Dezz

♬ original sound – Brooke Monk

They were virtue signaling, but that’s not such a bad thing — philanthropy, after all, can do good no matter the intention behind the giving. An internet where people feel the need to do charity stunts for clout en masse is still better than one that rewards you for trying to hammer yourself a better jawline. On the rare occasion that earnestness does go viral today, as it did during the Artemis II launch or after Alysa Liu’s ebullient free skate routine, “it just makes me long for a time when communal awe was more prevalent than it is now,” said Curran. But while today’s social media tends to reinforce the idea that Americans “hopelessly hate each other,” she said, “if you get down to the community level, you actually see all these really beautiful things happening.”

Last year, a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina decided to revive the ice bucket challenge as a fundraiser for youth mental health. They hoped to raise $100, maybe $200, Alison Malmon, founder and executive director of the charity Active Minds, told me. 

Most of the students were barely out of preschool when the first ice bucket challenge went viral. But suddenly, college kids, beauty influencers, and celebrities were once again racking up views by drenching themselves in frigid water online. The revived ice bucket challenge raised over $500,000 for Active Minds. It never came close to its predecessor’s stratospheric levels of popularity — things just don’t go viral like they used to anymore — but it did, for a moment, revive a sense of earnest do-gooderism that, for over a decade, felt increasingly relegated to the internet’s far fringes. 

The phrase millennial optimism was born a few months later, driven by nostalgia for a bygone and vaguely naive internet culture that most young adults today are old enough to remember, but young enough to romanticize. So far, there’s no indication that Gen Z’s rediscovery of indie sleaze portends a sustained, serious resurgence of viral earnestness culture, from billionaires or from the rest of us. But as MGMT would put it, maybe now it really is time to pretend.

A few weeks ago, I was zoning out, scrolling through Instagram stories. Among the usual photos of dinner recipes, museum pictures, and selfies, I saw a post that stopped me cold in my tracks. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion said that her then-boyfriend, basketball player Klay Thompson, cheated on her. 

The group chats activated immediately. My friends and I were stunned. We’d watch this couple work out together, celebrate the holidays, and even purchase a home through our tiny screens. Eventually, the shock turned to rage. The thing is: We don’t actually know these people. 

This is not the first time I’ve gotten worked up about a stranger’s cheating scandal. Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval. Halle Berry and Eric Benét. Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Even a random couple at a Coldplay concert raised the blood pressure of outside observers. 

Americans are divided about a lot, but when it comes to cheating, we’re in agreement: Don’t do it. And changes in technology mean that, for some, the definition of infidelity is widening. Writer Zoe Yu detailed this shift in a recent article she penned for The Atlantic about something called “microcheating.” 

“Just like regular cheating, microcheating is sort of nebulous and really hard to pin down because what goes for cheating in one relationship might not actually count as cheating in another one,” she wrote. “One person might think that flirting with someone over text is cheating, another person might not. This varies, I think, a lot from relationship to relationship.”

What other actions follow under the umbrella of microcheating? And how is technology shaping the way we think about our romantic relationships? We discuss that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.  

Is microcheating a purely digital thing?

It’s not purely digital, but I think because of how tech-driven a lot of our relationships now are, a lot of these small behaviors that might constitute a breach in the exclusivity of a relationship are very much digital. 

This can mean having an online dating account or subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans. Then there are these emerging little behaviors, like hitting like on someone’s Instagram post or sliding up on someone’s story.

Sliding up on a story?

Sliding up on someone’s story. As someone who’s firmly in the Gen Z cohort, I was explaining to one of my older millennial friends just how much meaning is suffused into something as tiny as a story.

A lot of Gen Zers will sit around and be like, “Oh my gosh, what does it mean that he liked my story? What does it mean that he slid up and responded with so-and-so emoji?” I think it’s because a lot of the time, the first ways that we were socialized with each other — at least in the Gen Z demographic — were actually through tech.

It’s interesting because on one hand, I think it’s very easy to sort of roll your eyes. But I’m not above seeing someone cute and going back to a post from a year ago, hitting “like,” and seeing what happens. I think we’ve all received the little looking sideways emoji on a picture of ourselves we posted. But it also seems like a lot to track. Does this mean people are tracking their partners’ likes and other online activity?

Yeah. I think one defining feature of microcheating is how one-sided it is; people are very much in an investigative mindset. 

What’s really interesting about cheating is that people are attempting to assign meaning to something that is actually a lot more complex. I don’t deny there is information that you can glean from someone’s online behavior and the way that they present themselves publicly on a profile, but also the human reality is much more complicated and much more hairy. 

I think one aspect of microcheating is that it boils down all of the human contradictions and irregularities and things that you might not understand about a person into these very reductive data points. What’s interesting is that the entire premise of microcheating is couched on the assumption that if you snoop and you find something, this is uncorrupted evidence.

How much of this is actually less about the relationship itself and more about embarrassment? Everything is very public-facing. I think of conversations with my friends where it’s just like, “I really like this guy. I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.”

That’s like the whole Sabrina Carpenter song, right?

Yes!

You might not actually object to your boyfriend liking some girl’s post. What you actually might be concerned about is the message that it’s sending to this person, given the social meaning that we’ve now assigned collectively to likes and comments and follows. 

You might not actually think, “Oh, my boyfriend might be attracted to this person because he’s following her on Instagram.” It might actually be the fear of “How is this going to reflect on me? How is this going to embarrass me and how is it going to affect the way that other people see my relationship and whether or not my significant other is sufficiently loyal?”

Is it possible to have a full life online without microcheating? Is it reasonable to expect people not to post or share memes or do whatever it is we do online if we also want to be in a relationship?

I think the bar for exclusivity has gotten inordinately high, to the point where people are demanding an exclusivity of emotion, of attraction, and you can’t actually share a laugh or share a private moment with anyone outside of this romantic relationship that is supposed to be at the center of your life. 

I think this is actually super damaging because it closes off all of these really, really great relationships, friendships that are outside of a romantic concept, but you can’t really reach for if you think that every kind of small behavior might be potentially suspect.

Our social media feeds are being inundated by clips. Big names like Justin Bieber, reality shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and even AI companies like Perplexity — they’re all using bite-sized video segments to advertise themselves on social media. And they’re not just posting from their own accounts; they’re paying thousands of anonymous people to do it for them. 

This practice, a marketing tactic known as clipping, is everywhere — and still spreading. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently wrote a piece breaking down how the practice works and how it might be an existential threat to more nuanced, full-length content. 

Sato spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why everything is a clip now, the companies behind it, and what comes next.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How would you describe what’s happening on our Instagram feeds? 

It’s basically the TL;DR-ification of the entire internet. It truncates everything we make and it all goes down to “We need a way for people to discover our content.” And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. 

Think about the politics videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Or sports highlights from the game the night before. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. A major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, to put on Reels, to put on YouTube Shorts.

What made you want to write about this now? 

The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular. 

Clavicular is really a great example where the point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams. They know him through these disembodied short videos of this other thing that exists, but nobody is seeing. And you have this person who comes from obscurity into getting a 60 Minutes interview. 

I wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the internet and how people are working to go viral.

Is there a difference between the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and what Clavicular is doing?

Clavicular is basically the industrialized version of a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. The difference is that there’s an ecosystem under it that is paid. 

For the month between March and April, I believe there were something like 1,600 clippers working on his behalf, generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely a scale game. It’s a hundred percent trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms. These pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds.

How much money is there to be made here?

[Clavicular] oversees 62,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. He claims the average is around $3,000 a month. It’s not nothing. Is it enough to support a family? Can you support a family on clips? Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this clipping platform; [they] basically say, here’s $10,000, make us go viral.

What kinds of companies are paying for this service?

I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service. RuPaul’s Drag Race. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Dan Bongino, former second in command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. So it really spans different industries. There’s definitely a variety.

When I’m scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something being put in front of me is an ad because it’ll say ad, but I don’t know when I’m seeing something organically or when I’m seeing something that’s been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it’s the same on Instagram or TikTok? That you’re seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed? 

Yeah, and I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content.

One rule of thumb that I like to share is, you can probably picture it now, you’re scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that’s like, “I can’t believe bro said that. Shocked emoji.” You know what I mean?

I’ve seen that before. And then watch the video. And then nothing shocking is said, and I’m just like, “I hate the internet.”

There’s a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting Perplexity via Joe Rogan’s podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity, and it would be hard, unless you checked the hashtags, to see that it was a paid piece of content. Buried in the hashtags, it says ‘Powered by Perplexity’, ‘hashtag sponsored’. 

Even that is a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. 

It is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they’re paying these accounts.

Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote? That I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this?

Yes, please.

“But overindexing on the clipped version means eventually, the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped, complete content in the first place.”

That is really sad. 

Whoever wrote that.

That’s crazy.

It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are, like, artful. 

Yeah. I will say, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. 

I’m a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short-form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences, and I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it.

I wonder if you think — from having written this piece on “The Clippening,” as you call it — if this is just our moment or if this is our forever,

For me, it’s really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so dominant right now. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should completely put their trust into the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don’t want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it. 

I think the balance is, if you’re someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short-form video. But how do you make it so the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality, where the clips are the justification rather than creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever? How do you avoid that as much as possible?