Shameless Media

Shameless, the Pop Culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff. You're joined, as always, by Melbourne Writers, Michelle Andrews, that would be me, and Zara McDonald, that would be you. Hello, Michelle Andrews, and hello, producer Eilish Gill again. Hello, hello, Gil. Coming up on today's show, Clipping Culture. Some of you may have seen the viral piece about clipping culture around this week.

So in today's episode, we are going to ask the big question, is everything we see on the

internet really fake? It turns out the answer is kind of complicated.

I thought it was going to be more complicated, though.

I thought that maybe the sentiment on the internet this week, which is, oh, everything is fake now, was a bit overblown. See, no, I think it is overblown. Oh, I'm not sure it is. I think we'll argue about this later. Great. I'll see you there. I'll see you there. Before we get into it, a quick shout out to our sponsor, Nespresso and their new Virtuo Up coffee machine inspired by style and discovery.

It has got many a fan in the shameless office. Thank you, Nispros. Thank you, Nisproso. All right. So,

when we decided to do this story, we thought, let's open with an example of clipping culture,

because this stuff can feel amorphous or confusing. Also, if I'm honest, before the weekend, if I heard the term clipping culture, I wouldn't know what you meant. So if you are listening to this and you're like, I feel like we've jumped three steps and you're referring to this term I don't understand, do not stress. We will explain that too. But we thought we'd start with a good example

to kind of root this in something. So of course, we're starting with Justin Bieber and Coachella.

Yeah. So cast your minds back to the first weekend of Coachella a month ago, maybe, a month

and a half ago. So the feed that weekend was awash with clips of Justin Bieber's performance. So you might remember

Justin Bieber had this very paired back performance compared to Sabrina Carpenter. He was

scrolling through YouTube. It was pretty ad hoc, pretty off the cuff, and very, very viral.

Super viral. So viral that even, I mean, I got around that I think I posted it on my own

Instagram and I don't really post on my Instagram anymore.

And our head of social is Nairma, even on the weekend, decided, no, we, shameless needs to

get around this, collated a bunch of videos from the internet posted it on our own channels.

Yeah. Little did we know at the time that a lot of the online sentiment and excitement about that

set may not have been entirely organic. So some experts in the online world say nothing we see

on the internet is organic. Yeah. And as you say, like there was, there's been a lot of chatter about whether that, that kind of sentiment around Justin Bieber has been organic or if it was completely concocted behind the scenes. I mean, the answer to that question probably is a little bit of column A, bit of column B, given I posted, we posted all very organically. But that's what we're going to deep today.

What we want to do is kind of deep the article we keep referencing in a moment, this article from Vulture that was all over my Twitter feed. If you guys didn't see it, don't stress, we're going to explain what it means. But we wanted to share a passage up top at the very top of this episode so you can see were becoming from with this Justin Bieber Coachella conversation. So the article's called The Feet is Fake.

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