How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines | The New Yorker

Two new books examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.

Save this story Save this story In the beginning, there was the egg. In January of 2019, an Instagram account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of a plain brown chicken egg and launched a campaign to get the photo more likes than any online image had before. The record holder at the time was an Instagram shot of Kylie Jenner’s daughter, Stormi, which had more than eighteen million likes. In ten days, the egg’s like count rocketed beyond thirty million. It remains at the top of the chart to this day, with more than fifty-five million. The account’s creators, who came from the advert

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