Bonus Episode: The Internet's First Influencer, Tila Tequila, with Lisa Nakamura

In this Part 2 episode, Eleanor continues her conversation with Lisa Nakamura, Professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Inattention Economy: Seeing the Digital Labour of Women of Colour. They dive deeper into her analysis of the digital labor of women of color, exploring how online visibility, exploitation, and platform economies are shaped by race and gender. Nakamura reflects on the rise of early internet influencers such as Tila Tequila to unpack how fame, attention, and toxicity have evolved online. She also discusses the urgent questions of accountability and reparations in digital culture, arguing for more ethical and just technological futures.

Lisa Nakamura is Professor of American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained in cultural studies and critical race theory, her work examines race, gender, labor, and power in digital media and internet cultures. She is widely recognized for her research on the racialized and gendered histories of computing, online identity, and platform labor, with a particular focus on the often-invisible work of women of color in technology. Nakamura approaches technology as a cultural object that can be read, historicized, and critiqued, drawing on interdisciplinary methods to explore inequality, ethics, and more equitable digital futures.

Reading List:

• The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet

• Jenny Davis - Paper on Reparations

• George Bush Reparations Letter

Transcript:

Eleanor Drage (00:53)

Welcome back! This is a bonus episode with Lisa Nakamura, who's talking to us about her latest book, The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. We'll be talking now about Tila Tequila, the Internet's first influencer. I hope you enjoy the second half of this show. If you missed the first episode, head over to our website or to wherever you get your podcasts usually, and you'll find the first part of the episode there.

Hi, I'm Eleanor Drage, and I'm talking to Lisa Nakamura about her forthcoming book, The Inattention Economy, Seeing the Digital Labour of Women of Colour. So, we've been talking about lots of things about the Navajo women designing Fairchild semiconductors, about Lisa's family working also in tech development. And we've been talking about what's in Bill Gates' bag and why everybody cares about the personal lives of these big figures, but not enough attention is paid to the crucial labor of people of color in Santa Clara Valley, the kind of proto Silicon Valley, and elsewhere.

So Lisa, I think it'd be amazing to turn our attention now to Tila Tequila, an icon of my childhood and a proto-influencer back in the day when there were no influencers. She pioneered content creation and gets very little credit for it. In fact, you say she was labeled an attention seeker back into the 2000s. And at a time when the public had a really ambivalent relationship with attention seekers, as they saw them online. We watched Big Brother. We had shows like “The cult of Celebrity,” which was very much alive and well. But we weren't open to trauma and mental illness in the way that perhaps there's more conversation, particularly among influencers, about this online, and Tila paved the way for these conversations on fledgling social media sites.

And you say in the book, and I really like this sentence, “She is in the bones of all social media sites, in the sounds, the images, the merch, the paywalls, the purchased intimacy. Disavowing or forgetting her also enables social media companies and users to imagine a digital future that was not founded on the experience of online abuse of women and people of color at scale.” So, tell us about Tila, what she's brought to the internet and to celebrity today.

Lisa Nakamura (03:21)

Yeah, well, two things. I'm interested in her because, looking at her career maps, this massive shift in the way we view work. So, who should get paid for what has really changed from the idea that people shouldn't get paid for broadcasting their everyday lives to strangers? And if they do get paid for that, they have to be movie stars or people who are otherwise traditionally viewed as meritorious, people who are good actors, people who are skillful or whatever. So, reality television was part of this new envisioning of what attention ought to be and where it ought to go. People like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, you might remember, were viewed as talentless celebrities. But I think looking at Kim Kardashian's empire, it's pretty clear that the shift towards giving attention seems like the inconsequential or the everyday, right? Not the meritorious, but rather the interesting or even the scandalous, is part of the logic of the whole infrastructure we have for entertainment now.

So Tila Tequila was also viewed as someone who had no talent, no skill, who didn't deserve attention, but at the same time, she was the most popular person on the internet in 2008 because MySpace was the most popular site, and she had the most friends on MySpace for not just that year, but other years too. She had over 5 million friends. So, she was in many ways the first influencer. She was not able to profit as much from it as influencers today because there was no profit sharing program on MySpace. And unfortunately, she's remembered as well as a very villainous figure because she did shift somewhat a lot to the far right.

But as you say, I think we have a better understanding of mental health now, and even the ways that the internet itself can impact mental health. So I noticed when I was studying her both in 2008 and now, so this is very gratifying to get to write about her 20 years after I was first studying her, that she was her own content moderator. MySpace didn't really moderate content in those days. People who used it might've remembered seeing stuff that should not have been on there, right? It was really the wild west. In some ways, they paved the way for what we have now, which is an unregulated media space. They had terms of service. They did not enforce them. That seems weird to a normal person, but we've gotten used to that reality, that there are rules that are ignored, unattended to.

So, she had to view huge amounts of toxic content about her as a queer woman, as an Asian woman, as a nobody, and deleted herself because otherwise other readers would see it on her page. Seeing negative and horrible things about you in the thousands every day for years was not an experience anybody had had before this. I would venture to say it was rare because this was a new medium. This was a new platform. People were not studying it this way. So the way that she absorbed this punishment in some ways is what women of color have done for many years in regards to lots and lots of industries, right? Many things that we have that are cheap are actually expensive, but they're made cheaply by cheap labor. So, whatever her political affiliation, understanding what it might have meant to be the first one to really experience toxicity at scale, I think, can help us understand what people are going through now as very, very public figures who have had no training necessarily in how to manage that and platforms that have no interest in protecting those people.

Eleanor Drage (06:58)

And who were expected to just take it to experience that and be okay with it despite her searing popularity. I mean, didn't she at one point? She said she mass emailed between 30 and 50,000 people and told them to come over to MySpace, right? When they weren't on there before. So, she was the maker of that platform. So, people online loved listening to her, loved watching her. I remember thinking she was incredibly cool and bold. And, people feel entitled to be really cruel, and particularly towards women of color online in a way that they think is completely compatible with their popularity, as if there's this really fractious relationship between popularity and likability. And it's like, “She's popular, but I couldn't like her. I can't admit that I like her.” And that's what makes her situation so incredibly cruel and difficult.

Lisa Nakamura (07:50)

Yeah, absolutely. I think she became a scapegoat for people's feelings of mistrust and aggression against the transitions around technology, but also the culture that was happening, right? So, the US is becoming increasingly neoliberal. The middle class is shrinking. There's a huge amount of resentment against what was seen as alternative queer culture, which had a brief moment with Tila, of being somewhat front and center. So her TV show, A Shot at Love, was the most popular TV show on MTV in its segment. And it was only about lesbians and straight men competing to date Tila Tequila. So, we laugh at it now because the trope was that she was deciding whether she liked men or women, but she was a bisexual woman. So, this really didn't have to be decided that way.

Yet at the same time, many queer people had never seen another queer person on TV, especially in a romantic setting where they were competing for the love of somebody who was also not a heterosexual person. So, I think it was a moment of awakening for a lot of viewers, and Tila herself was a refugee. She was not a highly educated person. People thought that she was loud and crass and overly sexual. But these are always terms that have been applied to women of color, regardless of what they're doing, the kind of double-edged sword of attention.

On the one hand, it can be a source of great profit for platform companies. That's what they're selling. Advertisements are a form of captured attention and monetized attention. At the same time, platforms often get to decide who is viewed and who is not viewed. So, we understand that through the algorithm, some things are hidden, some things aren't hidden. That's not an accident that some things appear, and some things do not. But also, some people appear, and others don't. And that's the reason why I wanted to write this book and this chapter, especially.

Eleanor Drage (09:49)

Tila experienced a cancellation of sorts on the internet. And that itself is a term that has been traced back to Asian American activist, Sui Park. Tell us what some of the complexities and ironies of cancellations when it comes to race and gender today, both for Tila and for other notable people on the internet?

Lisa Nakamura (09:52)

That's such a good question. I think cancellation has been rebranded somewhat by the right because they have started to engage in forms of censorship and dogpiling around people they see as overly liberal. And so some have called it accountability culture, right? As if to say this is more a form of justice where there wasn't equity before.

So, cancellation, I think I gave an interview about this for the New York Times quite a while ago, trying to understand what it was, is a form, in some ways, of trying to demonetize somebody. It's trying to deprive them of resources that they might otherwise get. So, if you cancel somebody, you're not buying their music anymore, you're not contributing to their commodity culture with your energy or time into them. Yet at the same time, cancellation is a form of attack, right? It's a form of attention. It's a different kind of attention. So, I was interested in Tequila because she was one of the first people to be canceled in a really, really big way. I was noticing how many people who had been fans of hers or, in any event, acknowledged her importance were now withdrawing all of that, saying in some ways what happened to her is what happened to the internet. It just became trash. This ability to call a person trash, it seemed to me, is very symptomatic of what happens when personhood is taken away from someone because they've done something that you find reprehensible. So, I was interested in the backstory of Tila Tequila as a refugee and how she had come here from a refugee camp in Singapore. Her mother fled Vietnam in a leaky boat, and she was pregnant with her at the time. So the trauma of having to flee violence in your own country, engendered by another country, the US, and going to the US to do it was just not lost on me. And then she went on to be someone who became, in some ways, a punching bag, but also a huge profit generator for the first really big social network. It just seemed to be very much of a piece, like what does the refugee do in the US? Things that other people don't wanna do often, right? They're often resettled in dangerous parts of cities where no one else wants to live. So this idea that the refugee is the test subject for things like plantations, labs, that's not just in the US, I think that's everywhere where people who are vulnerable and have no choice often become experimental subjects. So she, in some ways, volunteered for that. She couldn't get a job in Hollywood. She became, for the time, wealthy and well-resourced, but her fall was so fast. It seemed to me not just about the fact that she had joined the wrong political side, but that she was always already part of a group that was seen as not really American.

Eleanor Drage (13:01)

Indeed, what people want to see is a fall from grace. So it's a willful cancellation of somebody because of their popularity, not despite it. You talk about the refugee condition as one of exposure and violation, and that is so characteristic of the internet. That's something that Tila faced. Also, I love the way in the book you hear her story in the stories we talked about on the previous episode, more behind-the-scenes aspect of creation. But actually, Tequila was incredibly technical. I mean, she managed to work out how the internet worked at a time when I was just about logging onto my email and couldn't possibly really navigate. I didn't understand MySpace. I think I was really young, but she had a really strong technical prowess that was entirely self-taught, right? No manager, no nothing.

Lisa Nakamura (14:01)

Yeah, I think a lot of people learn whatever they know about computers from MySpace. I've talked to so many people who learn how to use HTML and CSS by trying to make their MySpace page do glitter and have music. They were highly motivated as young people to learn a little bit about how programming worked, which in some ways is really vital, right? Because that was a kind of literacy that people aren't learning now.

I don't feel like my students or most young people can learn that very easily. So this is not talked about much, but she was recruited to MySpace from her own website and from Asian Avenue, which I would love to write about more. It was a website, a social network founded by young Asian people in New York City. And it was the prototype for MySpace. In fact, MySpace tried to buy Asian Avenue, and they said, “No way, you guys are too skeezy. We don't want to have anything to do with you.” But yes, it's not as if there was a developer who was helping Tila make her page. She made her own page, and it was attractive to people because it was blingy. It had her own music, which I'm not going to say is great, but she was one of the first people to have a music player on the site. And the site became known as a music distribution site.

Taylor Swift released her first songs on MySpace. I don't know if people know that. It was a really, really important way for musicians to get their stuff out there without the use of the studio. And we take it for granted. Anybody can put on music now because of SoundCloud or whatnot. But it was really Tila Tequila who was among the first to use a music player. And MySpace forced her to take it down because they stopped partnering with that player. They wanted to grab all the profits from music plays for themselves. So, we could have had a very different music culture on the internet if we had had a different profit-sharing model. And the one she was using, which was called the Hooka, gave most of the profit back to the creator. So I'm interested in these things for economic reasons too. People are fleeing Spotify because it's so exploitative. It gives so little to the creator. If things had been somewhat more fair, we might not be in the situation where being a musician is so difficult, right? It's so difficult to own your own property. And I think with AI, I think Matthew McConaughey, what is it he says in Days and Confuse, “All right, all right, all right, because people were using it for deep fakes.” So, we could have had a different idea about who deserves compensation for the work if we'd had a different model.

Eleanor Drage (16:30)

Yeah. Even copyright and intellectual property more broadly is propelled forward by these violations of who's allowed to take your body and use it for various nefarious means. Do you think that the internet has gotten kinder? But given what you've just said, probably not.

Lisa Nakamura (16:55)

I think it's exploitative in new ways. Influencer is one of the most attainable-seeming jobs to young people. It's so interesting. So many kids are making money now on TikTok and Instagram who have never gone to college. And they just, in some ways, they're right. They may not make more money or do better if they go to college. So we're in an attention economy, and everybody knows it. Except for people who are older, who already have the jobs that young people are never going to get, either because they're being automated away or because we have somehow made it so much more difficult for jobs to exist for young folks. They have had to absorb a different logic about what it means to make a living and what it means to work. So, this 24/7 demand that influencers have to respond to people, to content, it's just grueling. It's so hard. It's very different from the nine-to-five IBM jobs or even factory jobs that people used to have. Not to say those were great jobs, it's a new kind of exploitation. And I think young women are disproportionately experiencing that in that space.

Eleanor Drage (17:59)

Yeah. Absolutely. I want to end on the idea of reparations. Reparations, you talk about in and out throughout the book, and I'm always incredibly interested in what reparations for people working on the internet should be, and indeed, how algorithms can be reparational? How can they be oriented towards the people who have been most impacted negatively by AI, for example, and actually actively do good for those people? To me, that's what algorithms, reparations are. And there's a great paper by Jenny Davis. I can post it in the episode, in the show notes about this, that basically says, “How far are companies willing to go to support marginalized groups in AI?” However, so reparations, certainly in the UK, something people argue about a lot in the pub, people assume it's just writing a blank check, get really angry about it, particularly in moments of austerity, hugely misunderstood. So, tell us what kinds of reparations you think should be claimed for unpaid labor and exploitation in the service of the digital economy and the tech sector. What should this repayment of debt look like, particularly for children and women of color?

Lisa Nakamura (19:26)

Yes, we are in a very radically unfair economic system now. And I think it's not a secret that the tech industry is particularly famous for producing a very, very, very small number of very rich people and either impoverishing or inadequately compensating everybody else. So, few industries have been this unfair. I don't think it can be ignored anymore. And it really has to be addressed.

The article you're talking about, Algorithmic Reparation, one of the co-authors is my colleague, April Williams. And it was deeply influential for me reading this because academics get a reputation for just complaining about stuff, right? We don't have plans for how to actually address it. We just like to complain about it and move on. So I was interested in reparations as a political movement and some of the history of that, particularly because members of my family received compensation from the US government for being imprisoned. So, there are lots and lots of examples of people who have been unfairly harmed by the state. People who were forcibly sterilized, say in the state of California, because they were seen as intellectually inferior or often just because they were poor. They were not seen as worthy of passing on their genes. It's very much like Nazi Germany, not known much in the US. They were given compensation. They were given money. So, I’m very interested in lawsuits because I feel like the tech industry is very, very much about the history of the law and trying to move compensation around, suing each other for patent violations, and who really created the graphical user interface. That's the history of it. There's lots of history of the tech industry paying for things they've done wrong, huge amounts.

So in the EU in particular, metas had to pay a huge amount of money for breaking laws, just straight up breaking them. And they keep breaking them because that isn't that much money to them. So reparations have to hurt. They have to be consequential to the people paying them. They need to find the right people. They can't be kind of broadly distributed, or if they are, it needs to be in the right group, but they have to be accompanied by an acknowledgement of what happened. So sometimes reparation is at the cost of apology and acknowledgement. And I knew this personally because I saw the letter that came with a reparations check from my grandmother. It was from George Bush, and it said, what happened to your family was unfortunate. That was it. As if it had happened as an act of nature, right? No one had been responsible. It just happened. Here's your check. So, for reparation to mean something, it has to be both emotional, affective, and material. It's not like one is better than or replaces the other. I can hear you typing a little bit, Eleanor.

Eleanor Drage (22:02)

Yeah, sorry. I’m typing because I'm on the subject of apology letters. One of the most fascinating ones that I've seen recently was one that Tanni Grey-Thompson, who's a very famous British Paralympian, received when the ramp wasn't taken out of the train. So she couldn't get out of the train. She crawled out on her hands and knees. And the apology letter was also very passive, so it made it seem as though it was no one's fault, sort of. It was totally absurd, as if the company lawyer had written it.

Lisa Nakamura (22:45)

Right? Yeah, because they want to absolve themselves of harm because they don’t want to pay.

Eleanor Drage (22:02)

Some reparations are seen as feasible, perhaps, because you can sue, like Tani, who probably couldn't be bothered. She's got better things to do. Those single things that are seen to be single instant scenarios rather than systemic events.

Although, of course, this is a systemic event, trains are just not built for disabled people. They're kind of add-ons that you make, like a ramp that can break. The system is not set up to serve these people, right? So you said in the book that some of the same public figures who supported racial reparations for Japanese internment refused to support reparations for slavery because the practice is seen as too diffuse, systemic, and violent to allow for an appropriate settlement. As perhaps harder to sue? What are you suing for? Is the culture of suing actually getting in the way of thinking about what reparations really are?

Lisa Nakamura (23:56)

That's so well put. In some ways, reparations are easiest when the group is very small and the amount of time is very well defined. So, this instance in which it's most needed is when it's most difficult to give or to argue for. I think what makes the most sense to me is that the tech industry actually loves to write checks because they have done it so much to get away with whatever they want to do. If we view attention as a common resource, let’s say, oil. They're countries where oil is everywhere, and people all receive a check for that because it's not seen as belonging to anyone except for the people who inhabit that country, and even that, right? They may not be the only ones, but it's a common resource, and everybody gets compensated. The attention economy, which is to say social media, algorithmic stuff like search, and AI. AI is used for making cars, but it's also used for creating girlfriends, right?

If attention is a common resource like oil or wind, why is it not possible to redistribute those funds in some way? This is not to say social media companies, the big five, should not make money because they absolutely should. Yet at the same time, what they're doing is selling something that already belongs to the people who are being made to pay for it in a lot of ways. So, there is a model for doing that. It's just not been applied in such a big way. And that's why I think we need to think about these questions of where repair needs to go. Can we continue to go on the way we are?

Eleanor Drage (25:30)

On that note, Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today on The Good Robot. This has been absolutely fantastic. If you're listening, run. Don't walk to buy Lisa's new book, The Inattention Economy: How Women of Colour Build the Internet, out in February. So I think when this episode airs, Lisa, thank you so much.

Lisa Nakamura (25:31)

Thank you for having me. This was great, great fun. Thanks.