A Brief History of Shit You Should Care About
all the secrets about how we got here xxx
This is an excerpt from our debut book ‘Make It Make Sense’ which is out now!!! It would make my heart so fucking happy if you got yourself a copy, I love you so much x
How we got here
By Lucy
August 2018, International Relations lecture, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
The worst question you get asked when you’re about to graduate from university isn’t about how big your student loan is or whether you’ve got a boyfriend yet, it’s ‘what are you going to do next?’
If you don’t have an answer, you laugh awkwardly in the way someone does when they haven’t quite heard a question, and say something like, ‘Oh, not sure; my job probably doesn’t exist yet!’
Frightened at the prospect of a real world in which, as lecturers loved to remind us, there was no money in what I wanted to do (journalism), I genuinely didn’t feel like I had answers to give. But the response to this question felt bigger than that. There was no money or certainty in anything, so I figured, if I wanted some sort of career in the only industry I was remotely interested in, I might as well try and do something. This thought process might tell you a little bit about my nature: specifically that I’m incredibly susceptible to reverse psychology, so if you tell me that something’s not possible, I’ll likely try to prove you wrong. So, as you do when you’re a naive and overconfident 21-year-old, I set out with my best friends to build something new entirely.
Everyone loves an origin story. They want to know how the hell we went from three girls in a small town in a little pocket of the world to running one of the most prominent Gen Z media platforms around. The answer lies where all our angst does: the internet.
Then, they want to hear about success and how to get it. Are there secrets and magic formulas to recreate it? Do you ever feel like you really have it? That part is not so straightforward because the internet doesn’t let young women simply have success. It makes us second-guess ourselves, always showing someone else doing something smarter. More noble. With better legs. That makes you question whether you deserve the success. Whether you want it. Whether you can handle all those faceless DMs and hot takes and competitive click-baiting.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Shit You Should Care About (SYSCA for short) started in that International Relations lecture in 2018, where I sent those offhand texts to my two best friends: Ruby, the eternal love of my life and the only one who can handle working in the chaos I create; and Liv, always lost in a painting, a song or a car park. The three of us had followed each other out of our small town and into the city: Wellington, in this case, where we were spending our late teens and early twenties (and an obscene amount of money) getting degrees in Media and International Relations that none of us were sure we wanted, and that no one was sure we’d use.
We went with the mantra ‘Cs Get Degrees’ (which none of us stuck to because we’d always been overachievers) until I found myself struggling to keep up with the unnecessarily boring reading and articles we had to get through week after week for class. Here I was, three years into a degree where I was literally studying power, social movements, and how the media affects the two, yet somehow, I felt less informed or inspired to learn about the world than ever before. Why weren’t people talking in words we actually knew and used? Why did I feel stupid for not knowing phrases like ‘hegemonic discourse’? Where was the colour? Where was the fun? There must be a better way to make sense of all of this, I thought over and over again as I lugged those textbooks up four storeys to my tutorial each week. In hindsight, it seems audacious to think the three of us would be the people who would find this ‘better way.’ But when you’re a young woman in your twenties, sometimes audacity1 is all you have – just one of the powerful forces that, we would go on to learn, would be constantly under-estimated.
This was 2018, when Instagram was mostly used for saturated brunch photos, and the crying face emoji wasn’t cringe yet. Blog- ging was a dead or at least dying art, but we decided to start a blog anyway. Shit You Should Care About became a WordPress site where we wrote three posts a week about whatever we thought people should, as the name suggests, care about. Abortion laws in Texas, bullying culture on The Bachelor, how to beat procrastination — it was a mixed bag from day one. Like literally every publisher to ever exist, we quickly realised that you could write the best shit in the world (it definitely wasn’t), but if it didn’t have an audience, the impact was like the proverbial tree falling in the woods: no one heard it. I wouldn’t consider us a ‘publisher’ until we’d been working on SYSCA for about three years, but I guess we always thought like one.
What we did next didn’t seem groundbreaking at the time, although everyone seems to say that except tech gurus on stage at digital trends summits. We started repurposing our content and posting where we knew everyone was hanging out: Instagram. Maybe it was a wild idea to use a photo-sharing app for words, but SYSCA felt like a welcome disruption to the influencers peddling waist trainers and former high-school classmates sliding into our DMs with a ‘Hey, hun!’ and an attempt to recruit us into the latest insane multi-level marketing scheme. We knew there had to be a better way of using this platform. A selfie of a bunch of A-listers wasn’t going to change the world, but it could become the most-liked tweet of all time. What if we took an ounce of this attention away from the people who’d always had it and tried to do something meaningful with it? Without realising it, we developed what we could have paid an advertising agency $100,000 for: a strategy. That December, we reached 1,000 followers. Midway through 2019, we had 20,000, and by the end of that year, we had 61,000. It took me years to appreciate that the skill of seeing a story and knowing exactly where and how it should be presented was a result of going moderately viral as a teenager with my One Direction fan account - now I thank god for all those ‘wasted’ hours (more on that later.)
Then 2020 hit. We were locked inside, living through a global pandemic, an insurrection in the United States and Britney being freed. We were expected to be productive and get fit and bake bread and get over our exes whilst simultaneously going easy on ourselves, taking baths, doing face masks and not being cynical about celebrities singing ‘Imagine’ down the barrel of their cameras. Everyone was desperate for information but needed it in the simplest (and least depressing) form possible, because we were all experiencing the most giant, confronting, humbling and vulnerable thing at the same time. The antidote to the hell on our screens felt like it was hiding in plain sight: what if we made the news as human as it could be? If we were all going to be posting right through this weird and fucked-up time anyway, we might as well try and make that meaningful.
In lieu of living a normal life, I started spending all my time reading, writing, and understanding, explaining and sharing what was going on in the world. We called the published content ‘no bullshit daily updates’ because that’s exactly what they were. At the same time, Ruby decided we needed a media kit in case our platform accidentally grew big enough to become a business, so she taught herself how to write one of those. Liv designed all the content in the hours between her lectures, which she was now attending via something called Zoom. We weren’t a traditional news site that could rely on revenue from banner ads, nor were we influencers who were getting paid to show their PR spoils; we didn’t know what we were, just that we were doing a 24/7 job completely for free. We did it because we loved it.
As the pandemic burned on, so did the pressure on celebrities to show an awareness of the world around them. Remarkably, they started coming to us for their news: three young women in New Zealand, curating and sharing digestible takes on what to care about. (It’s important for me to note here that we never strayed from our intention in those initial text messages to make our content very open. Yes, we were sharing a lot of news, but we were also sharing a healthy amount of Harry Styles and reality TV content as well – we’re nothing if not human!) I’d ring the girls from my childhood bedroom freaking out that we were on Ariana Grande or Billie Eilish’s Instagram story or that Madonna or Joe Rogan had just followed us. Whatever we were doing was working, and by June 2020, we’d reached a million followers. By June the year after, that number had tripled. It was more than any other news site in New Zealand, rivalling some of the largest publishers in the world.
Some people made babies during those lockdowns. We were on our bedroom floors making new media. In 2020, we launched our first podcast, ‘The Shit Show’, having raised the money to buy a podcast microphone by selling tote bags online. We taught ourselves how to produce and edit and record and host – skills our media lecturers weren’t teaching us, at a time when social media wasn’t even on the curriculum.
As our stats grew to unfathomable heights, I became more and more grateful for a decision we’d made in our very first ‘meeting’ at the coffee shop below my flat: that we would keep ourselves out of it as much as we could. None of SYSCA was about what we looked like or what we wore; by design, when people found us, it was because of our minds and not our faces. There’s that audacity again.
Social media had a particularly terrible rebrand in 2020. Fake news engulfed people’s feeds and infiltrated politics more than we thought possible. Algorithms divided us. Shadowbanning (muting social media users from sites without them knowing) was happening more frequently, but was always denied by the major platforms. It was a mess. In a bid to escape the algorithmic hell we were so embedded in, we launched our daily newsletter as something we could own. In its infancy, this daily email (which cutely became referred to as ‘The Newsy’) was delivered to inboxes each day to round up, unpack, and connect the dots of all the things going on in the world. But The Newsy quickly took on a life of its own. We started to introduce our audience to smart and funny people we’d met along the way; people who knew a lot about something or a little about everything, people who were just as obsessed with the news as us.
This is where Bel comes in. We met in the shared office SYSCA had grown into and immediately bonded over our love for words and our addictive work and pop-culture tendencies. Most days, we’d collide at the front door at 9am, coffee in hand, both having been up since 5am Zooming or pitching or working on something, as we put one dream down (writing) to chase another one (paying the bills). One Thursday afternoon in the car park outside our local pub, I asked Bel what she’d been up to, and she said something I’ll never forget, with a glint in her eyes, ‘I’ve had the most terrible time lately. But you know the best thing that came out of it? Meeting people like you. You help me come alive again. You help me phoe- nix.’
And so Bel joined the SYSCA universe. We turned that word, ‘phoenixing’, into one of her first columns (aptly named‘BelChimes In’), and the scope of our work grew from not only helping explain the shit people should care about externally, but also what was going on inside of them. Bel taught readers new words for things that we all felt but didn’t know how to describe, explored how not to rob ourselves of joy and how to move through loneliness, and examined how our internal lives are intrinsically bound up with the way the world works around us, both online and offline. Her words started to generate a kind of reverb in our community we’d never seen before. We knew we’d hit a nerve.
So that’s how we got here.
This is not a coffee-table book of memes, news infographics and social media hacks that will date the second the ink dries on the page. Cringe. It is about the world and how we make sense of being in it at a time when the internet is making us, breaking us, and changing everything as we know it at such an impossible speed. It’s a collage of anecdotes, essays, poems, scripts, and exchanges that capture the wisdom and experience we’ve collected by being alive and online, curious, ambitious, broken and put back together again.
We wrote this book because social media is ephemeral, and, like our attention spans, it will wax and wane and potentially even disappear at some stage. We don’t have Master’s degrees in literature – we’ll leave the refined art of that to the experts. But at a time when everything feels like it’s whooshing away in an endless scroll, we want people to be able to hold the answers (or questions) about what to do with all their big feelings in their hands. Because there’s so much shit in the world, so much to make sense of, so much to be afraid of, and so much to feel anxious about. We hope this becomes one small, tangible thing to touch, and read and love, and refer back to in the moments when you’re not so sure. Moments when you might even need a bit of that audacity:
Auckland, New Zealand September, 2022
BEL: Big moment. Bout to go snip ties with my romantic endeavour so I can come home and write this book.
LUCY: good luck and you have everything you need already in you <3
Words to live by.
Audacity: The naive ambition championed particularly by young women alive with the feeling that their ideas are worth listening to.
I just finished listening on Audible and I LOVED the book.
The orchid stuck flowering made me laugh out loud.
Thank you for writing your book. Big love.
I’m late to SYSCA so this was super helpful, and may I also add an emphatic hell yes