Most pop culture enthusiasts are familiar with the origins of the phrase ‘15 minutes of fame’. It’s derived from an Andy Warhol quote that went, “In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” But lesser known is the fact that after the phrase took off, Warhol took a special delight in mangling his own line to deliver comical variants like: “In the future 15 people will be famous”, or “Everybody will be famous in a 15-minute future”. To the contemporary eye, Warhol’s ‘variations’ read like an acknowledgment of the nature of virality in 2024 — protean, ever-shifting reality intoned by an unreliable narrator.
I keep returning to Warhol while listening to Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), an excellent new podcast by journalist Jamie Loftus. She has covered the Internet and social media in one form or another for much of her career. In this podcast, she interviews people who intentionally or otherwise found themselves anointed ‘the main character’ of the Internet, albeit briefly. The most recent episode features an interview with Robbie Tripp, who in 2017 posted about his “curvy wife Sarah” and went viral, launching a months-long discourse online about body positivity and beauty standards.
Relatable content
In an earlier episode titled ‘A fish fell from the sky’, Loftus talks to Dr. Ben Beska, the 30-something Newcastle-based cardiologist who became a sensation in June. In a now-viral thread on X (formerly known as Twitter), Dr. Beska describes a remarkable sequence of events (with photographs every step of the way): he finds a group of magpies circling around his lawn and, upon investigating, spots a miraculously still-alive goldfish flapping about on the grass. After placing the near-dead goldfish in a metal container, Dr. Beska somehow saves its life. His initial message to his fellow doctors on a group chat went, “It’s Alice!”—he meant to type ‘it’s alive’ but autocorrect typed ‘Alice’ instead and thus began the viral phenomenon of ‘Alice the goldfish’ and its Lazarus-like return from the dead. Sadly, the fish dies of its wounds (experts surmise that a bird of prey had probably dropped it onto the doctor’s lawn, mid-flight) a week later, but not before the story makes it to news headlines around the world.
From the beginning, two things stand out about Loftus’ approach to this story. One, this is a sociological podcast, not a true crime one, so Loftus is not majorly concerned about “what really happened” — even though conspiracy theorists are a big part of Alice the goldfish’s viral fame. Loftus says plainly, “Whatever brought Alice to Dr. Beska’s lawn is between Alice and God.” Two, Loftus is primarily interested in how online fame intersects with a “regular” life like Dr. Beska’s.
Remember, this is a regular man with a busy day job. He isn’t from the world of influencers or ‘shock jocks’. He has no locus for understanding the demands of online fame, or indeed, the monetisation aspect of it all. This is a man who, before becoming the ‘main character’, posted “mostly memes and Taylor Swift content, along with some observations on the medical profession”. It is this ‘clash of two worlds’ that makes the episode so approachable and interesting.
Up close with tech
‘Sixteenth Minute’ is just as effective when the main event or character is inextricably linked with larger-scale patterns and business shifts in the online world. A good example of this is the episode titled ‘HQ Trivia and the Quiz Daddy’, about HQ Trivia, one of the fastest-growing mobile apps in the world between 2017 and 2019. The app would host increasingly difficult trivia-based multiple-choice questions — Loftus interviews the man who hosted the quiz streams and came to be known as the app’s public face, ‘Quiz Daddy’ Scott Rogowsky. The story of Rogowsky cannot be told without his ego clashes with HQ Trivia and Vine co-founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll.
What emerges in the podcast is a vivid portrait of how frenetic the worlds of technology and media were in the period 2017-2019. Technological advancements and the ill-fated ‘pivot to video’ championed by Mark Zuckerberg were beginning to tank media houses. The once-fawning media coverage of Silicon Valley CEOs was changing into something a lot more critical, and Sixteenth Minute picks on all of these strands one by one.
This is a highly recommended podcast for anybody seeking to educate themselves in how Internet culture has evolved over the last decade or so. And if you are already ‘terminally online’, you’ll probably be nodding along every few minutes.
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
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