did yuppies ruin the internet?

how yuppies spearheaded the attention economy and the buzzfeed-ification of it all

Recently I stumbled across an article written by Becca Law on muzzle velocity, Alex Cooper, and the neverending hum of the internet. I’ve been unable to get it out of my head since.

The first paragraph mentioned Ezra Klein’s episode about Donald Trump, titled Don’t Believe Him, which has become a personal gospel of sorts that I rewatch frequently to soothe my incessant anxieties—he perfectly articulates what I’ve spent the last year and a half simply trying to understand, let alone describe in a manner persuasive enough to encourage anyone else’s comprehension.

I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for months, but my perfectionism continues to get in the way as I attempt to string together a bunch of pretty words to explain the general sense of unease and uninspiredness that’s begun circulating across the internet. Thank god for Law. Her insightful—and relaxed—prose perfectly captures what I’ve been thinking, and it’s dosed with enough humour to help us swallow this excruciatingly harsh pill of reality:

The analogy of each ten-second piece of content hitting you like a bullet, again and again, actually makes me feel sick to my stomach. The sheer velocity of it. The force. The way the algorithm doesn’t stop—it just reloads and keeps firing. No time to breathe…hijacking your attention and flooding the zone so completely, so relentlessly, that reality itself starts to glitch. Until truth isn’t debatable—it’s irrelevant. Until you’re so sedated by speed that thinking feels like a liability, because if you pause for even a damn second, you’re already behind.

Ah! Yes—finally the ideas swirling around in my brain have something concrete to latch to. While reading her piece I couldn’t help but continuously nod along, screenshotting sections to send to my dear friends, who continuously put up with my rabbit hole discussions on internet culture and the deconstruction of the individual and the stagnation of culture, &&&….I’ve already written a love letter to my friends, I’ll spare you my declarations of undying love.

The point is—it’s refreshing to know I’m not alone in my feelings of despair and anxiety.

My brain craves a logical understanding as to why something happened—if I ever want to feel a sense of serenity about it—and as someone who grew up deep in the hollows of cyberspace, there’s something I want, no something I need to know.

Is there someone to blame for the corrosion of the internet—for the gradual shift toward content that hijacks our attention and leaves us in a loop of unsatiable desire?

Obviously, we can throw a fair amount of that blame onto the Broligrachy, but as I’ve mentioned before, the internet is made and unmade by us—we’ve built, and continue to build the internet. As much influence as the tech bros have, we can’t dump the entirety of the blame on them.

But if not them, then who? Can I blame Cocomelon? Or Alex Copper? Or Hawk Tuah? Or Joe Rogan? Or or or…

Honestly, I’d rather not. If only to avoid coming off as some pretentious arthouse fanatic whose main personality trait is the constant rejection of the dominant culture and the zeitgeist. That way of thinking is boring. It’s been done before (by me, approximately 5 years ago), and honestly, it fails to get to the root of the problem, because no single person—or entity—is to blame.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I wonder:

Does the blame lie not with a single person, but rather with a cohort?

And that, dearest reader, is how I ended up here, eager to prove that the decline of the internet can be traced back to Yuppies and their ceaseless influence on culture and society.

I’m being rather ferocious. And perhaps a bit clickbaity. Alas, I’m merely adhering to the laws of the internet. But, as always, before we can answer the question at hand, we must define our terms.

Oxford Dictionary defines a Yuppie as:

a young person with a well-paid job and a fashionable lifestyle.

That doesn’t give us much to work with, so for your sake (and mine), let’s dive a bit deeper.

The term Yuppie first appeared in the 80s as a new rising class began populating the culture: young urban professionals who were highly educated and ambitious, known for their designer clothes and luxury cars. It didn’t take long for the term to take on a negative connotation as critics began accusing those who fell under the label of being "selfish, materialist, and out of touch with the rest of society."

As soon as I started trying to piece together this puzzle, I posted a poll on my Instagram story asking my followers if they thought Yuppies ruined the internet, but my friends raised some valid points:

Despite the poll results suggesting that the majority agreed with my hypothesis, I began cogitating the definition of Yuppie—what it meant in the modern sense—and how their influence shaped the internet during such a pivotal time.

the results from my instagram poll

Much of this arguement rests on our definition and understanding of Yuppies and Yuppie culture. Additionally, who we classify as one.

According to The Yuppie Closet, Yuppies

believe in the power of positive thinking, personal growth, and giving back to their communities. They place a high value on education and often pursue advanced degrees or certifications in their chosen fields. They also prioritize their appearance and often invest in high-quality clothing and grooming products.

Today, Yuppie culture encompasses fashion, activities, beliefs, and values that are embraced by a community of individuals who place importance on education, positive thinking, and altruism, while also valuing personal style, propriety, and decorum.

While it may not be for everyone, those who embrace this lifestyle are often passionate about their values and committed to making a positive impact on the world.

via The Yuppie Closet

In 2000, The Independent claimed that the Yuppie era was dead, but just last year journalist and author, Tom McGrath published Triumph of the Yuppies, an insightful first history of the Yuppie phenomenon. The book chronicles the roots, rise, and triumph of Yuppie culture—from ‘60s idealists to ‘80s uber-capitalists—conducting extensive research and interviews to capture the key moments and figures, including the infamous former Yippie-turned-Yuppie Jerry Rubin.

McGrath’s was recently interviewed by Robert DiGiacomo for Next Avenue, who (like most of us) was particularly curious about McGrath’s interest in publishing a book about Yuppies now, when they seem relegated to the fringes of society, shunned and shackled to a bygone era. He explains that “there definitely is a connection to today…it’s an important thing to understand: How did we get here, not only with Yuppies’ lifestyle influences but also the income inequality and the divides along economic and educational lines?”

I recommend you read the full interview, but one question in particular is most relevant to our ponderings:

In the current political era, what might have been distaste for Yuppies is now a distaste for so-called elites. You trace this throughline from '80s Rust Belt communities like Youngstown, Ohio to the MAGA movement.

I do think there's a connection; in part it's an economic resentment or economic grievance. People believe they lost their livelihoods at the expense of this more elite group that shipped jobs overseas or automated them or simply downsized them. It's partly economic but also partly cultural — that sense that well-educated people who live in or near cities tend to have a certain arrogance of how life should be lived. It doesn't always play well in places that are different from them.

He concludes with a wonderful point: “The truth is the word [Yuppie] goes away but [the idea of being a Yuppie] didn’t really go away at all, although maybe some of the most overt in your face excessiveness isn’t there.”

Aha! There it is! Just what I was looking for.

The term Yuppie may be long gone, but its ascendancy is so deeply embedded in our cultural and economic systems that we couldn’t escape it if we tried. We can label this group Yuppies, or Elites, or Raging Libs—it doesn’t really matter. They all blend into the same category: upper-middle-class individuals, often oblivious to (or unwilling to acknowledge) their privilege, with their heads in the clouds, forever out of touch with reality. For the sake of our arguement, we’ll continue to refer to them as Yuppies. It’s a fun word, okay!

Now, why am I so keen to place the blame on them? Let’s rewind to a significant year in internet history: 2006. AKA, the year Jonah Peretti (one of the minds behind The Huffington Post) founded BuzzFeed. You might be wondering wtf BuzzFeed has to do with this. You may even be wondering if I’ve gone completely off the rails. Let me explain.

BuzzFeed served as a blueprint for the internet’s modern attention economy, building its name on what detractors would call clickbait content but what venture capitalists saw as highly engaging, consumer-driven content optimised for maximum shareability.

Back in its glory days, the site was populated exclusively with listicles, outrageous quizzes, and social-first news. It quickly became a digital media powerhouse that fundamentally altered online media and the way audiences engaged with information, albeit adding little real value to the broader ecosystem of the internet.

The bread and butter behind the ethos of BuzzFeed, and what skyrocketed the company toward household fame, was its mastery of virality. The company cracked the formula of creating—just funny-enough, engaging-enough, interesting-enough—content that people naturally wanted to share with their friends.

The majority of people sharing this content were, you guessed it, white-collar workers stuck at their desks (aka Yuppies), who finished their daily work by 1 PM every day but were forced to remain at the office until 5. To avoid going stir-crazy under the fluorescent lights, twiddling their thumbs in boredom all day, these young urban professionals began sending BuzzFeed quizzes and listicles back and forth, sending links to uber-specific—but ultimately meaningless—quizzes titled something like How Edgy Are You, with an attached text message along the lines of: “i got taylor swift wearing a 1975 t-shirt…what did you get?”

via @littledeserthouse

Let me be clear, I’m not shitting on BuzzFeed. I was a fan in its heyday. But we can’t ignore the impact it had on the internet.

Many might argue (correctly) that I should redirect my blame to BuzzFeed instead of the Yuppies. But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Ultimately I believe we hold a certain level of responsibility in how we choose to be engaged with. We teach these media empires what to feed us, just like we teach algorithms what content to push on our FYPs. BuzzFeed didn’t invent clickbait content, it simply refined and mainstreamed it because we, as a culture, began rewarding that type of content.

Its content reflected the shifting internet culture, capitalising on our desire for quick entertainment, social-sharing habits, and our ever-decreasing attention spans. BuzzFeed has since fallen off, but its legacy lives on in how we consume news, engage with one another and navigate the online world. A world where virality reigns supreme over long-form, nuanced journalism. So yes, Yuppies did indeed spearhead this media velocity approach of fast, easily digestible content that revolves around engagement metrics—shares, clicks, and virality—over substance.

I worry many might take offence to this claim, so let me be clear. I don’t think it was intentional, no one could have predicted how normalising fast, low-cost, high-engagement content would come to bite us in the ass.

Though, you may be asking yourself why? Why were Yuppies seeking out this type of content? As always, the culprit is capitalism and the cultural and societal impact that existing in late-stage capitalism has provoked globally.

The 9-to-5 grind—with its long hours but little real productivity—created an audience that craved bite-sized, escapist content. People wanted something quick to consume between Slack messages and Teams meetings.

With the transition to an (almost) entirely digital workforce, the internet has become a passive coping mechanism, much like television and radio were for the previous generations, albeit much more addictive due to its interactive nature. The content that Buzzfeed was creating wasn’t just a response to audience demand, it was a reflection of the zeitgeist and the Yuppie-driven shift in advertising and media consumption.

Yuppie culture is known for its obsession with efficiency and engagement metrics, which pushed companies like BuzzFeed toward creating content that chases clicks and shares over substance. Thus, the modern internet’s attention economy (clickbait headlines, engagement-driven algorithms and the infinite scroll) organically grew, prioritising performance metrics over meaningful content.

Yuppie’s consumption habits during these pivotal decades of internet culture accelerated the decline of blogs, long-form journalism, and deep-dive content. Just compare the early 2000s blog era (where people followed individual voices with substance) to today’s TikTok/reels culture, where the algorithm tells you what’s worth watching versus you seeking out what you enjoy. Even serious journalism has been forced to adapt. The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker now all use engagement-driven headlines and more digestible, skimmable formats to keep users engaged and on their sites.

Most of us are overstimulated, yet constantly unsatisfied, and Yuppie’s consumption patterns were a key factor in shaping this.

Maybe they didn’t single-handedly ruin the internet. Still, their dominating cultural preferences, work habits, and digital consumption behaviours certainly laid the groundwork for the attention economy we now find ourselves trapped in. Virality, engagement-based media, and algorithm-driven entertainment were incentivised by the way Yuppies interacted with the internet, and we’re all suffering the consequences of this muzzle velocity approach to digital media.

We spend our days endlessly scrolling, overwhelmed by information, yet solemnly finding anything of substance that will satisfy us.

But what do you think? Did Yuppies ruin the internet?