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Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) is a sociological podcast.
Most pop culture enthusiasts are familiar with the origins of the phrase ’15 minutes of fame’. It is derived from a quote by Andy Warhol, who said, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But few know that after the phrase became popular, Warhol took particular pleasure in twisting the line into his own, such as: “15 people will be famous in the future”, or “Everyone will be famous in the future for 15 minutes”. From a contemporary perspective, Warhol’s ‘diversification’ reads like an acknowledgement of the nature of virality in 2024 – a mutable, ever-changing reality expressed by an unreliable narrator.
I keep going back to that, listening to Warhol Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), A great new podcast by journalist Jamie Loftus. She has covered the internet and social media in some form for most of her career. In this podcast, she interviews people who, intentionally or otherwise, find themselves the ‘main characters’ of the internet, however briefly. The most recent episode interviews Robbie Tripp, who posted about his “curvy wife Sarah” in 2017 and went viral, sparking months of discussion online about body positivity and beauty standards.
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In the last episode, titled ‘A fish fell from the sky’, Loftus spoke to Dr Ben Becca, a 30-year-old Newcastle-based cardiologist who became a sensation in June. In a now viral thread on X (formerly known as Twitter), Dr Becca describes a remarkable sequence of events (with photos at every step): He found a group of magpies circling around his lawn and, on investigation, he saw a miraculously still-alive goldfish flopping around on the grass. After placing the nearly dead goldfish in a metal container, Dr Becca somehow saves its life. His first message to his fellow doctors on the group chat was, “It’s Alice!” – he meant ‘It’s alive’ but autocorrect typed ‘Alice’ instead and thus began the viral phenomenon of ‘Alice the goldfish’ and her coming back from the dead like Lazarus. Sadly, the fish died from its wounds a week later (experts speculate it was likely dropped on the doctor’s lawn by a bird of prey during flight), but not before the story made news headlines around the world.
From the start, two things are clear about Loftus’ approach to this story. One, this is a sociological podcast, not a true crime one, so Loftus isn’t too 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. Becca’s lawn is between Alice and God.” Two, Loftus is primarily interested in how online fame intersects with “regular” lives like Dr. Becca’s.
Remember, this is a normal guy with a busy day. He’s not from the world of influencers or ‘shock jocks’. He has no way of understanding the demands of online fame or, indeed, the monetisation aspect of it. This is a guy who, before becoming the ‘main character’, “mostly posted memes and Taylor Swift content, as well as some commentary on the medical profession”. It is this ‘collision of two worlds’ that makes this episode so accessible and interesting.
Closeness to technology
‘The Sixteenth Minute’ It’s just as effective when the main event or character is inextricably linked to larger-scale patterns and business changes in the online world. A good example of this is the episode titled ‘HQ Trivia and Quiz Daddy’, which is about HQ Trivia, one of the fastest-growing mobile apps in the world between 2017 and 2019. The app would feature increasingly difficult trivia-based multiple choice questions – Loftus interviewed the man who hosted the quiz streams and became known as the public face of the app, ‘Quiz Daddy’ Scott Rogowsky. Rogowsky’s story can’t be told without his ego clashing with HQ Trivia and Vine co-founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll.
What unfolds in the podcast is a vivid illustration of how frenzied the world of technology and media was in the period 2017-2019. Technological advancements and the unfortunate ‘shift to video’ championed by Mark Zuckerberg had begun to hurt media houses. The once flattering media coverage of Silicon Valley CEOs was now becoming much more critical, and Sixteen Minutes takes up all these aspects one by one.
This is a highly recommended podcast for anyone who wants to educate themselves on how internet culture has evolved over the past decade. And if you’re already ‘terminally online’, you’ll probably be nodding off every few minutes.
The author and journalist is working on his first non-fiction book.
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