She can’t stop streaming

(CNN) — I have been covering the extremities of the internet and how they affect our real, offline lives for more than a decade now.

I’ve spent countless hours burrowing down online rabbit holes. I spent months on the road trailing a traveling cult. I was even swept up in the crowd in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 – America’s starkest example yet of what happens when the online mob manifests beyond the internet.

Next to all that, a road-trip to California with “Emilycc,” a mild-mannered 28-year-old Twitch streamer, seemed like it would be straightforward and not too concerning.

For more than four years, Emily has streamed almost every waking (and sleeping) moment of her life online.

From George Orwell’s 1984 to Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, people spent decades grimly envisioning a dystopian world where our every waking moment is being watched. Then, in the 21st century, the technology for constant surveillance arrived, and countless people chose to turn the cameras on themselves.

Not many do it to the extent Emily does. I wanted to meet her and figure out why she was doing this. Why take such an extreme step as to broadcast her whole life on the internet? Why was she seemingly voluntarily living what many would consider a nightmare?

After spending two full days with her – which meant two full days on her live stream – what scared me was coming to realize how close I was already was, and how close many of us already are, to reaching Emily’s extremes.

On Route 66

Emily is one of millions of streamers on Twitch, the live-video platform that was bought by Amazon in 2014. According to some analyses, at any one time there are about 100,000 livestreams happening on the platform at any given moment.

But Emily’s stream is different because it never stops.

“Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life,” a Washington Post profile of Emily from last year reads. “It feels wrong to complain about this life, the new American Dream for millions of people who are lonely, young and online.”

Earlier this year my producer colleague Adam Falk heard that Emily was planning on leaving the small apartment in Austin, Texas, that she had streamed from alone for years and heading for Los Angeles.

A new generation of young people is flocking to the city with hopes of finding success not on the famed soundstages of Hollywood movie studios, but in front of webcams at so-called “streamer houses.”

Online influencers, streamers, and personalities chose to live with one another in a home where they are all constantly creating content and appearing on each other’s streams. In the online world of building clout, this kind of cross-promotion can yield more followers and more money. The best-known iteration of such a home was appropriately called “The Hype House.”

Emily was planning on driving from Texas to her new home in Los Angeles, taking in some of the nostalgic spectacle of Route 66 and streaming live all along the way. She kindly obliged when we asked if I could hitch a ride.

I met her halfway through her journey, in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her 2004 Toyota Camry was loaded with her possessions and her more-than-10-year-old cat Bella. With a camera secured to the inside of the windshield, Emily was, as always, streaming live to the world.

Immediately, I became aware we were sharing the car with someone, or something, else.

“James Corden from Temu,” a synthetic voice blurted as I settled into the passenger seat.

Next to the camera, Emily had a phone propped on a grip on the dashboard – the kind people use to follow maps as they drive. But this phone was giving a different set of directions: a chaotic feed of emoji-laced messages rapidly flowing up the screen.

This was “chat.”

Chat is, I would realize, the defining feature of the streaming experience. Emily’s viewers don’t passively watch her, but post live comments onscreen, jockeying for her attention. Those who really want to get her to respond can pay to have their comment robotically read aloud through Emily’s phone.

That, it seems, is what the perceptive viewer had done as I stepped into the car, to make sure we heard their assessment that I looked like a budget version of the British TV host James Corden (I should be so lucky!).

I had a lot of questions for Emily.

How much money does she make? (She never said exactly, but it’s enough that she doesn’t need another job.)

What do her family think of what she does? Do they get annoyed at family gatherings? (It’s complicated – but she doesn’t go to family gatherings.)

How does she date? (She doesn’t.)

We get into all of that and much more in our latest episode of Devoted: Streamers (which you absolutely should watch).

But here I want to explain a bit more why this, perhaps more than any other case of online extremism that I have reported on, stuck with me.

When the dopamine hits

After an hour or so heading west on Route 66, with Emily at the wheel, me in the passenger seat and the chat continually interjecting, we came upon Williams, Arizona. It presented the kitschy Americana trappings we were looking for: vintage tin Coca-Cola signs, cardboard cut-outs of Elvis Presley, and a couple of stores selling cowboy hats. The population is 3,000, and the town doesn’t extend far beyond its single main thoroughfare that runs parallel to the railroad tracks.

Before we got out of the car, Emily removed the phone with chat from the dashboard mount and grabbed her camera, which was connected by cable to a backpack. The backpack, she explained, was a transmission kit, to help her keep streaming through the patchy or absent cell service on our route through the Arizona and California deserts. Inside was a device that essentially acts as a big cell signal booster. It’s the same kind of gear that news organizations like CNN often use to broadcast breaking news stories from far-flung locations all around the world.

In Williams, this technology would today enable the live transmission not of a world-changing geopolitical event but of Emily and me going to a coffee shop to order two cups of coffee to go. Four hundred people were watching. There aren’t many things that Emily doesn’t live-stream – even when she sleeps, she keeps the broadcast running, normally with her face just out of shot.

One thing she will step away from the lens for is a trip to the restroom. Rather than leaving her audience having to entertain themselves for a few minutes (which usually prompts a torrent of questions about where she’s gone) Emily entrusted me with the broadcast while she went to the coffee shop’s restroom.

“Why do I feel like I am seeing into my future?” I asked as I took over the stream.

I put myself in front of a camera for a living, but any time I’m on screen there’s a purpose: I’m interviewing someone or I have a specific number of minutes or seconds to deliver a piece of information to the audience.

Suddenly, I was entrusted with a broadcast where I could do nothing, or I could do anything. The lack of intentionality brought a different kind of pressure. What was I supposed to do to keep these hundreds of people entertained?

But in the short few minutes, I was running the broadcast, and I started to kind of get the appeal. There was instant reaction, instant gratification. “He actually might be a decent streamer,” one person wrote in chat.

As I thought about it later, the brief dopamine hits I felt as the comments came in thick and fast were not dissimilar to the short-lived sense of gratification we sometimes feel when we see one of our social media posts have been “liked” by a lot of people – or liked by someone we care about.

$50 to eat a pickle

Through my reporting, I have spoken to a lot of people who have been addicted to social media as consumers. I rarely gave much thought to the psychological pull of the technology on the other side, for the creators and the social media stars themselves. What I experienced in my brief time being the star of Emily’s stream was a pull far more acute than that of just being a regular social media user. An important component of this added pull is money.

People in the chat don’t only have the ability to send comments to Emily. They can also send her payments. Some buy a subscription to her stream so they don’t have to watch ads that occasionally pop up, some give her money to buy a coffee, and some will offer money (sometimes a couple of dollars, sometimes $40 or $50 or) for Emily to do something on stream. Normally it’s rather mundane (and odd) like honking the horn on her car for 60 seconds.

Not far from the Arizona–California line, when we stopped at Mr. D’z Route 66 Diner, I offered to eat a pickle (a food I despise) live on the stream if someone paid the equivalent of $50. Instantly, someone paid up.

“This CNN guy could be a good streamer,” one viewer commented. Apparently chomping a pickle for money was a sign I might have a future in the creator economy.

Streaming alone

As sunset approached and we crossed into the California desert, I was getting tired. Being on camera all day was exhausting, not least because even when I tried to forget we were live, one of those paid-for computer-voiced comments would come through.

Often, as I was in the middle of talking seriously with Emily, someone would pay to have the computer voice say something distracting or unrelated, derailing the conversation so that we both forgot what we were talking about.

This was annoying, yet it felt very familiar. How often have you been in conversation when either you or the person you are speaking with receives a text, a call or a push notification that interrupts the flow?

I also noticed that whenever I asked Emily about ending her stream, or about when she plans to stop, some people in her comments would become angry, demanding to know why the CNN guy was trying to interfere.

Who the hell are these people? I wondered

As dusk fell, we went our separate ways for the night. I went to my hotel room to order room service and decompress.

But for Emily there was more content to be made. Around 10 p.m., as I was about to go to sleep, I checked in on her stream. She was still live, eating a later dinner on her own, with chat.

Making it to California

I arranged to meet Emily in downtown Palm Springs the next morning by the city’s 26-foot statue of Marilyn Monroe, another woman who had spent much of her life in front of the camera.

The pressures that Monroe lived through of presenting a perfectly manicured, glamorous image still exist in many ways today. But some of it has given way to an online demand for “authenticity” – for reality, even when mundane. That, I guess, is a demand Emily is trying to meet.

As we drove toward Los Angeles, Emily told me that being constantly on-stream has taken its toll on her mental health. When she broke down crying on stream once, after her dog died, someone clipped it and shared it, so that it has since been viewed millions of times across the internet. She’s dealt with threats and a stalker. It was clear to me that the parasocial relationship she had with the anonymous figures in her “chat” could at times be problematic.

Yet the more I thought about what worried me about what Emily was doing, the more I saw it in my own behavior.

Streaming online all day and all night for years on end is extreme behavior, several degrees more serious than your everyday social media overuse. But it’s not that extreme, I realized, as I compared it to my own social media behavior.

One of the scariest apps on an iPhone is the one that tracks your usage. Like many Americans, I have two phones, a work phone and a personal phone. Last week I spent an average of seven hours a day on both my phones. On an average day I pick up both devices more than 100 times each to check them. That’s not to mention the considerable amount of time I spend on my laptop, my iPad and watching television.

According to Pew Research, 41% of US adults say they are “online almost constantly.”

Throughout our journey I asked Emily when she planned to stop streaming, or at least to cut down and stream for a few hours a day rather than around the clock.

As I asked the question, I reminded myself of how many times I had tried, and failed, to cut down my online usage. My attempts had lasted only a couple of days, sometimes a couple of hours, before returning firmly to the “online almost constantly” category.

Emily told me she could stop anytime she wanted.

So far, she hasn’t.

So far, I haven’t, either.

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