Earlier this year, Taylor Lorenz went to a beach party thrown by Instagram.

It's called Insta Beach and it's up in Malibu north of L.A.

And they invite the top like 500 to 700 young influencers in L.A.

Lorenz writes about internet culture.

She's at the New York Times now,

but she was working for the Atlantic

when she went to Insta Beach.

It was just this beautiful beach,

just north of L.A.

Everyone was really young and cool,

and I felt like an ancient pale corpse

because most all of them live in L.A.,

so they're really tan.

And they were just having a good time. It was a lot of kids having a good time.

The backpack kid did a dance. It skewed really young, you know, 10-year-olds, middle schoolers,

and high school age kids. It sort of had the awkwardness of any high school social event.

Like, it kind of felt like a homecoming party or something.

There's definitely a lot of clicks, a lot of, like, kids daring, you know, other kids to talk to each other and just like regular teenage stuff.

But regular teenage stuff that's worth billions of dollars.

There was one young influencer at the party with 1.5 million followers on Instagram,

another with 6.8 million, plus young comedians and actors and web performers,

all of whom intuitively get how to leverage being online to help their careers.

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