Lucy Blakiston, the face behind Shit You Should Care About, loves the internet.
The online news platform debuted in 2018 and today has since amassed more than 3 million followers on Instagram. “I feel very f*cking passionately about the internet, I love the internet,” Blakiston tells Teen Vogue.
Before she started SYSCA with her friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer, Blakiston could have been characterized as an “audacious, obsessed, naive fangirl.” Now, six years into that journey, she’s swapped out naivety for being underestimated. “I’m often put in rooms with media men and I always make a point to dress really girly. I love pink, I’m five foot and very unassuming, and I love watching people slowly realize that I deserve to be there.”
The 27-year-old, who describes herself as “just a girl” from small-town Blenheim, New Zealand, is taking the whirlwind in stride. Fresh off the release of the Make It Make Sense book — the essential SYSCA take on life as a fan, a woman, and a voice in media, written with Bel Hawkins — Blakiston can feel her life changing, and it makes returning home that much more important.
“I have this strange sense that my life is changing in front of my eyes, right now,” she says. It’s the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of making the internet her full-time job. Yes, Blakiston has toured with her favorite author of all time, Dolly Alderton. Yes, she presented to a crowd of 70,000 at Web Summit in Lisbon, in the same space that One Direction once performed. And still there’s a sense of relief that’s unique only to the sound of plane wheels hitting the Blenheim tarmac, where she’ll be wrapped in the colossal love of friends and family.
SYSCA was born out of a need to simplify the news for young people, offering a space where they can get political updates and pop culture news. “Anything they want to care about and not feel stupid for loving, like Harry Styles or The Bachelor, but also caring about gay rights in India, or the climate,” Blakiston says. The platform started as a WordPress blog and eventually transformed into an Instagram account. “We can be the ones to change the news,” Blakiston recalls thinking.
It was also born after a tour Blakiston took of Southeast Asia. After arriving in Myanmar in 2017, she heard a lecture from someone who’d been imprisoned for reporting on the Rohingya crisis, which she’d previously not heard of.
“I remember sitting there thinking, why do I not know that [so many] people are either being displaced or killed — and I'm in their country right now, and it's taken me coming here to find out about this,” she says. Upon her return to university, Blakiston wrote every single assignment on Myanmar and the Rohingya people. “It shouldn't take going there and seeing it firsthand. I wish there was a way that the internet could make us properly feel these things, and maybe we're getting there, especially with TikTok and being forced to be a witness.” She only now realizes how key the Myanmar trip was to eventually starting SYSCA.
Blakiston was two years into her project when 2020 happened, which only fueled her purpose. Blakiston wanted to “make the world make sense.” Make Covid make sense, make the Trump election make sense, be an informative space following the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. The New Zealander told herself, “You don’t have your feet on the ground over there [in the U.S.], so f*cking platform the people that do.”
It was also the year that “celebrities decided they needed to show they cared about stuff,” she says. It was either them “staring down the barrel of a f*cking iPhone singing ‘Imagine’ or them being like, let’s go to a Kiwi chick and share her Instagram posts as a way of showing we care.” Among the big names reposting Blakiston’s posts were Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, skyrocketing SYSCA’s following from 200,000 to a million within a month. Though the pressure mounted, this is what Blakiston had studied for.
Blakiston cut her teeth as a One Direction fan, a crash course in what became her SYSCA skill set: visual design by editing herself next to Harry Styles; mobilizing a community by bringing fans together to vote 1D for awards; editing text by reading fanfic and tweaking them in her head. Being a fan “galvanizes you,” she says. “It’s a catalyst to creation. More than anything else I've ever found, I'm so grateful to have been a fan — even though you get shit on for being a fan, as a young woman particularly.”
It’s that blend of news savvy and fandom internet that makes SYSCA unique. Blakiston understands the importance of having access to information about current events, and wants young people like her to be engaged and to care about global politics. She also knows how fun and fulfilling fan communities are. And that’s what her followers love about her.
Young people make Blakiston’s world spin. They’re in her DMs or replying to the SYSCA newsletter, checking on her wellbeing before they unleash their own stories on her. She adores them for it. “Their answer to feeling sh*t mentally, reading the news or going into the holiday season is never to opt out. Young people, generally speaking, know it's a privilege to be watching atrocities through a screen rather than living [them],” Blakiston says. “They think, how can I continue learning about this stuff and be mentally okay? Because change can’t happen if we're … all mentally cooked.”
Blakiston’s understanding of the importance of protecting mental health is personal. In 2019, her brother died, and she’s been learning to cope with that grief ever since.
“Anyone [who has] ever lost someone will know that nothing will ever feel as good as when that person was around. You do prep yourself for being like, this will be a nice day, but it will be clouded in loss,” she says. Still, her grief has also helped fuel her desire to make the world a slightly better place. “That’s something quite aspirational that I want people to know about grief. Life can still be good, even though there's always this shadowy part to your life. It can still be better than it's been, even when you've gone through something deeply tragic. You'll always feel this loss, but making new memories and new members of your whānau that have popped up, it's not all bad.”
That’s really what’s behind SYSCA. Yes, it’s the need to make the news more accessible and to meet young people where they are, but it’s also a deep desire to do something. Taking action, even if it’s online, is Blakiston’s way of making herself feel better when the world is dark, and it has the added benefit of helping her followers, too.
“You can doom scroll, but you can also feel like you're doing something about it, like with my job,” Blakiston says. “I think I can be in the news so heavily all the time because I can read the worst [stuff] you've ever read, I can make sense of it, and then share it with other people, hopefully, in a way that won't make them feel totally depressed.” Blakiston refers to the Hīkoi Mō Te Tiriti, a march that took place across New Zealand in November, in opposition to anti-Māori legislation. “By being able to mobilize in person — or if that isn't the way you can help best, seeing everyone rally around it online — I think it makes people feel like they have some power and some say,” she says.
Despite her heavy online presence, Blakiston is easily grounded by friends and family, who give perspective and offline distance when she’s too in the weeds to grasp it. “I live a very big life from a very small place and I think that's what keeps me healthy, normal, happy,” she says. She’s the girl that was upchucking sick and still attempting to carpool her friends to a Hozier gig. “Without my friends, I wouldn't be this person. Without my female friends…I wouldn't have had the audacity to just keep going.”
And what’s the sh*t that Lucy Blakiston cares about? “I care about the climate because of what it's going to do to people. I care about the economy because the cost of living is ruining people. I care about the hīkoi, because I care about the way that everyone involved in that cares more about our country than the people trying to f*ck it up.”
“This is why Shit You Should Care About works,” Blakiston says. “It's not about money, it's not even about the news. It's not about fangirling. It's not about f*cking algorithms. It's about people.”
