By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN
(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.
Immedi