Digital creep
I love these two ding dongs
So being off of facebook and Instagram was fine until things started going south…well, down south. I could not put down the news, I doubled the amount of blogs written by economists on my Feedly & I watched a lot more youtube videos than I ever had. Finally, I was finding myself on reddit a lot (and I don’t even have an account!). It was too much.
After days of having my nervous system on overdrive, I finally turned off the internet, put on a fire and started to tackle my backlog of shows and library books. I didn’t think more David Graeber is what I really needed at this moment in time, but maybe MORE David Graeber IS what I really need? I continue to work my way through his essays. Mr. Tucker and I are also watching our way through the seasons of Taskmaster that we’ve missed, and we’ve also started Son of a Critch (now with 100% more SURPRISE Malcolm McDowell). We aren’t TV people, but I feel like things that take you out of the current moment are a helpful and soothing balm from THE HORRORS.
At any rate, I have cleaned up my lists and plan to focus on just reading the newspaper every day instead of mainlining news sites and BlueSky all day. I am always surprised when I get digital creep, but I shouldn’t be. I find myself on autopilot for a few weeks adding more and more content to sift through every day until one day I realize that I am overwhelmed by content. I wake up, I scale back, rinse & repeat. I would love to say that I have come upon some magical system whereas I have discovered the ONE TRUE PATH to reclaiming your time back from digital creep but alas… I guess my advice comes down to just don’t “like and subscribe for more!”?
Generalizations and the chronically online white knight
I don’t want to get into the weeds about this much but here is today’s mini rant. Holy pope on a rope am I tired of folks being immobilized from taking ANY action at all because that action may be seen as imperfect.
I am using the Buy Canadian movement as an example because I have never seen so much hand wringing over what constitutes “Canadian” in my LIFE. Yes, for sure it would great if you could buy 100% Canadian from a company that is HQd in Canada, is listed on the TSX and who employs Canadians. But it isn’t very realistic. Firstly, we don’t have everything we need here – it’s a global economy; and secondly, most products are a combination of: sourced, made, packaged, cooked, designed in, supplied by, HQd in…etc.
I am very tired of coming across posts every day by martyrs hoping to lead us all down the road of salvation by eulogizing on the topic of inclusivity. They (rightly) point out that disabled folk, poor folk, newcomers, older folks etc. may not be able to fully commit to this movement because of limitations and barriers. But the thing is: no one is going after marginalized people! We instinctively know that not everyone is able to fully participate.
As a person who is disabled it absolutely infuriates me when someone white knights their way into using marginalized folks as a shield for their own behaviour. I know a lot of disabled folks. They were able to function before amazon and almost no one I know uses amazon at all because there are alternatives. Even if they are, no one cares that they are. Writing a post about how if amazon goes away it will harm disabled people is a red herring these people use to justify their own unwillingness to divest from their comfortable and easy purchasing decisions. What they are looking for is absolution and they are getting it by posting and seeing all the comments agreeing with them. But I am willing to bet that they’ve never advocated for more accessibility in their communities (ramps and door openers are a great start!) and probably use the disabled stall with regularity.[1]
This is not a treatise against advocating for marginalized communities. Au contraire, it’s a call to reflect on whether or not you are using marginalized folks to gain wider culture points or as a justification for your own choices. But generalizations exist for a reason and so when someone says, “Buy Canadian!” it is with the caveat that we all have limitations that others may not see. Perfection is the enemy of the good, after all.
Here she goes again…algorithms
But we aren’t good with generalizations anymore because if we don’t caveat every single minute possibility, it’s a feeding frenzy online. You can’t say the most neutral thing in the world like, “my favourite colour is red,” without someone screaming in the comments, “WHY DO YOU HATE BLUE!?” Then it goes viral and you are the baddie-de-jour. It’s the lowest common denominator of human interaction that allows zero grace for humans acting human.
Because the algorithms favour pile-ons, we get served up a lot of this viral content, which we react to, thus furthering the reach and influence of it. In turn, we have trained ourselves to be overly-cautious with our language so that we don’t anger – and we get rewarded by – complete strangers on the internet. So at the risk of inciting rage in others, our very basic, general post about liking the colour red now becomes, “I love all of the other colours but my preference is red – not that it’s better or worse than the other colours – it is just what, I personally, prefer.” I think also that goalposts are constantly shifting online not because it leads to bringing more people to your side but because once people become acclimated to certain rules in the in-group, the only way to peel away from the pack is to take more outlier behaviours and try and normalize them with new viral content. This new standard gets shared widely and those folks go viral and get more followers. This creates a new outsider group of people who aren’t terminally online & who didn’t know about the new thing. Voila: new people to pile onto! Rinse, repeat.
I am sure if you lean left you read the above paragraph as a condemnation of the left but also if you lean right, you’ve read that as a condemnation of the right. That’s how insidious this system is and why bad actors often chaotically post extreme content from both ends of the political spectrum: it works. It also pushes us further away from each other.
Interestingly, bots have latched onto this & a lot of creators are discovering if they do videos on, say, Russia/Ukraine, the whataboutism pile-ons start in the comments, “Forget Russia! What about Gaza? Isreal is the real monster here!” But people can care about multiple things so I dunno what to tell ya, bots. But I think it is telling that foreign interference agencies have discovered that we are motivated to change our opinions and methods of communication based on the bullying in comment sections, so why not step into that vacuum and create some fake drama? At the very least it will stir in some doubt (much like if you click your red ruby slippers three times and constantly post, “Ukraine invaded Russia” on Truth social, eventually some people will believe it).
Step back.
Assume that people are trying their best.
Ask yourself, “is this a positive and productive post/comment I am making?”
Be clear with what your intended goal is in posting/commenting.
Give grace. We’re all at different stages of our journey.[2]
[1] there is usually only one disabled stall in a public bathroom and you should always leave it for disabled folks, if you can. If there is a line up, please allow people who need the accessible stall (or in the case of someone who needs to change a baby because often the station is in there) be next in line for it. If you are able-bodied you usually have the choice of many, and we only have the one. Also, some people require urgent access to a bathroom due to the nature of their disabilities.
[2] There was a time when I was a chronically online edgelord but I have really cleaned up my act since the pandemic. It’s ok to change, even if it is only marginally better, that’s still better. There is a post probably in here about how most progressive men often find me exhausting due to sexism but they will claim it is because I am too opinionated/abrasive. Ironically, it’s never the men in that social group who are considered obnoxious even though they often spout similar commentary (or in some cases, repeat/steal what I have said to much kudos).
The people’s radio
The Broligarchs
I was up late last night reading Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Known mostly for his dystopian novel, 1984 I think both are still pretty relevant today. Maybe a little TOO relevant…
I had requested Down & Out months ago from the library (it is still popular! and profoundly racist! Caveat emptor!) and only received it recently. It was written in 1933 which is the same year that Hitler’s Nazi party came to power. It’s also the year that they created and started to sell the Volksempfanger, or as it is known in English: the People’s radio. When the Nazis came to power, not many people could afford a radio. After WWI Germany was devastated and inflation and unemployment rampant throughout the Weimar Republic years. Cleverly, Goebbels orchestrated the creation of a low-cost radio that ordinary Germans could afford. It was a smashing success: by 1941 some 65% of households owned one.
Sure, it had some shortcomings such as it had trouble with shortwave transmissions and it had trouble picking up weak signals but it was a small price to pay for its purpose: spreading the message of Aryan/Nazi ideals and nationalism through music, operas and plays. It also played soundbites of Hitler’s speeches and messaging set to music. Their genius was in the fact that the Nazi party didn’t have to play ads during films or manipulate the news (although they did that as well) in the hopes that Germans would buy a paper or pay to see a film. Instead, it was the ultimate communication tool: streaming their propaganda straight into people’s homes as entertainment. Their goal was to make “every national comrade a radio listener.” It worked.
The state of…
It’s not hard to think of social media as being the defining medium of the current era. A few Broligarchs own almost all of the SM sites and have essentially co-opted the communities we’ve created online. As someone who actually built a career as a Social Media Manager I knew it was absolutely possible to manipulate and advertise your way into the public’s heads but I think I lived in a dream world for a long time where I thought people would be logical and not believe the more outrageous things that floated around. Boy was I wrong.
First, they came for our grandparents: I spent a lot of time explaining to older folks that they should check their sources and verify before sharing content. Then they came for our parents: the 2016 US election was what really sent me over the edge. We had pizza gate fueled by support for QAnon and allowed to explode on 4-Chan and 8-Chan (and other platforms). Then it came to light that we were being manipulated with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At this point I had been diagnosed and was struggling with my own personal future so I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have. The writing was on the wall: the world was becoming increasingly fractured, and we were being syphoned into our own silos by algorithms, which even the social media companies didn’t understand completely.
By January 6th, 2021 it was no longer possible to ignore the man behind the curtain. Social media had created these monstrous groups of people who truly believed some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories imaginable. Two years before the Broligarchs had testified before the US congress, promised better content review, and banned what they considered “bad actors.” The reality is though that what we were seeing was only self-preservation. They wrung their perfectly manicured hands and pretended to “do something” when nothing was really done. Trump was banned from twitter & facebook and life went on. But below the surface, all was not well. Trump started Truth social in retaliation for being banned from the big boy’s playpen, and anti-lockdown and anti-mask protests were signal-boosted by algorithms everywhere. Misinformation was rampant and it still is today.
”Most of the comments here are Russian bots” – Reddit every day
While Canadians are heading to the polls sometime this year, CSEC is warning that we very well could have election interference.
I think one of the things people don’t really understand about bad actors is that their intention is to destabilize. So in that respect, both the left and right are right: they’re both are being targeted. The goal of destabilizing a country is to see which side riots first, and they don’t care which one. Foreign interference is about stirring division, so whatever whips the commentariat into a frenzy is the thing they’ll focus on. They’re great at using AI to create emotional images with fake information to get their content shared far and wide. I’ve seen entire websites dedicated to propaganda articles and designed to look like a legitimate source when it’s just a content farm for social media to give fake news an air of authenticity. SM companies have done very little to manage the bad actors whether it is in comment sections or meme groups. Eyeballs and engagement mean more money for them, so why should they care?
The Gilded Age
I keep seeing comments & articles such as The Gilded Age is Back! and it isn’t difficult to argue with that take. Wealth disparity is larger than ever and I would argue that the US election was bought and sold with a little *wink wink* *nudge nudge* from the Broligarchs and other titans of business (and of course, our old Pal Russia).
It’s interesting to read Orwell’s Down & Out right now considering he was out there slumming it in Paris when there was high unemployment and poverty in between the two world wars. He wrote a book about it right as the Great Depression swept across Europe*. There are eerie similarities from the end of WWI and the Russian Revolution to today: a pandemic, hyperinflation and political strife leading to mass immigration. It would be hard to also look at the recent fall of the stock market and see the tariff threats (wax on, wax off) and not compare it to that era. But getting back to Europe a century ago: the US called in its loans with their banking collapse, the German banks couldn’t pay. This caused a domino effect to other countries such as Britain and France who also defaulted on their loans. This then lead to Smoot-Hawley (also a disaster)…and I think you can see why people think we are in a similar cycle now (I make no predictions myself).
Economic uncertainty seems to be a vacuum that people want a strongman to fill. The rise to fascism was of course guided quite readily by this uncertainty and leaders who were all too happy to break treaties and point fingers at groups they could blame. To be clear: Hitler made and broke many deals while many countries in Europe ignored it until Germany invaded Poland and it couldn’t be ignored anymore. Enter, “the war to end all wars.” I don’t think the takeaway here is that there is ever an exact replica of an era but also that there are always themes and we should ignore those themes at our own peril.
If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes truth
On September 30, 1939 – 6 years after the Germany people had access to the Volksempfanger – the radio waves in Germany announced a Polish attack. Naturally, Hitler took to the airwaves and announced that they would retaliate, and the invasion of Poland began. It didn’t matter that the attack was a lie: he who controls the medium, controls the message. The German people, for the most part, believed what they were told.
We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and realize that these platforms we are addicted to our the modern day People’s Radio: we are isolated in our homes consuming infotainment where we now rarely see posts from our friends and communities who we actually follow, but we are instead fed meme rage bait and advertising. I know I am a broken record but enragement is engagement and the algorithms will feed you content based less on what/who you follow and more on what keeps you scrolling. By staying on these platforms you are simultaneously making money for Broligarchs AND training the algorithms to know how to keep you more addicted. I don’t use the word addicted lightly either: these spaces are designed to make you feel like you are engaging in a community while simultaneously making you feel unfulfilled and empty, while still craving the real human need for connection. Dopamine jolt after dopamine jolt feels good for awhile but once you get off of the merry-go-round and take a breath you know that it does make you feel awful deep down in your core.
The impact of social media cannot be understated, either. It’s slowly destroying democracy. Repetition of the most popular content is making blatant lies feel true and now with AI, these regurgitation machines can create photos that look so real that it adds legitimacy to posts from random people who we don’t even know but that are constantly served up to us as we scroll. Like, share, and comment is all that needs to be done with a few clicks to continue the wave of bullshit.
If you think I am just talking about one side of the political spectrum, you’d be wrong. I’ve managed to piss people off all along the continuum! GO ME! A rule of thumb that I have had for a while now is that if something feels extremely GOOD (I agree with it) or extremely BAD (it makes me angry) it is worth a deeper dive. Often, I discover that the meme or post is lacking in context, excludes important information or is a straight up lie. Because there is so much noise online most people will just reshare whatever feels right to them. But that’s not how you get informed or cut through the bullshit. Worse, people REALLY dislike when you challenge things because we are so polarized that it feels like a personal attack to some folks.
I divested from the Meta properties at the beginning of the year and quite frankly, it’s done me a world of good. I am still on Bluesky but I don’t have the app on my phone, so I have to go over to a desktop to consume it. Staying off my phone has helped me hop off of the 24-7 rage machine.
I was worried about missing the connection with friends but honestly, I am still very much connected to the people I want to stay in touch with. As a bonus my life has gotten MONUMENTALLY BETTER. Instead of a faucet of misery I carry around in my pocket to drown myself in over-stimulation, I’m trying to do other things. The disconnection from 600+ people has also been a huge boon to my mental state: I am reading a lot more, doing more personal writing, working on more art and watching more good shows. I find it easier to disentangle myself from the digital world because I am never fully enmeshed in it. As a result, I am a much calmer person.
But the best thing about not getting almost all of my news from social media is that I have to seek it out. It’s a little more difficult but worth it. A few things I have changed:
I went to political party websites: during the last provincial election I spent some time sifting through the party platforms and researching candidates. I will do the same for the upcoming federal election as well. I have very little interest in seeing attack ads online or sloganeering (#BlessThisAdBlocker).
I read the paper like an old person: I am not going to pretend like individual journalists don’t have their own bias but I have decided to stick with The Globe and Mail. Why? Well as Goldilocks said, “it is just right.” The Globe and Mail has me agreeing with it as much as it has me angry with it which means that it is doing its job. Also, anything owned by Postmedia (ie: most of Canada’s news) is owned by an American hedge fund. No thanks. I don’t need more conservative billionaires to tell me how to think (I am looking at you, Washington Post & LA Times). While I do love CBC for local stuff, it’s pretty beige for news. As for independent media I haven’t found one particularly unbiased source as they tend to skew super hard left or right. I do think The Walrus covers some great longread topics fairly neutrally as well.
No more Meta (or twitter but I killed that in 2018): no more facebook, no more Instagram and definitely no threads (ew). If you haven’t read The Chaos Machine, I definitely recommend it. It is basically a book on the real dangers of social media. This week a new book came out called Careless People written by an ex-employee at Meta. facebook is running around desperately trying to suppress coverage of it. Because that is a totally normal thing for people who haven’t done anything wrong to do, right?
No more google: I have moved 100% over to Firefox and use Duck-Duck-Go as my search engine (although I hear good things about Ecosia). I am in the process of moving my mail as well (but it is taking longer). I am sick of being tracked by google constantly. Search is so bad now that even if you put in the right parameters, you still get a page of ads. Want to buy from a specific store? SORRY! Best google can do is a list of dropshippers on amazon.
No more apple: whomp, whomp. This is more of an issue with their products going from top end to absolute garbage in the last 15 years. I also don’t like being tied down to an ecosystem so I am moving shortly to a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS (but that is a longer and more involved story).
Other entertainment: bye Netflix! Hello CBC Gem! Bye Spotify! Hello Quboz! I don’t want to pay companies who have shady business practices or who donate to things that go against my values. I sent an e-transfer to a creator I love last week and in return she hooked me up with a free substack subscription to her content. Substack is an absolute menace and I refuse to give them a penny of my cash (use ghost or beehiv, folks!).
Fundamentally, we get trapped into using platforms because competition gets pushed out and they lock us in. That was literally the goal of so many venture capitalist “disrupters” of the last decade. The capital kept pouring in and these companies would sell things at a loss so that no competition could get a foothold in that business. Uber and Lyft were both jousting to be the last one standing and when they were, the plan was to jack up prices and finally turn a profit. It’s bonkers! It’s the same playbook Walmart has used to grow its empire: open in small towns, decimate the local economy, be the last business for miles and make the entire community reliant on them for jobs and sundries (but not taxes, they never pay taxes).
Everything feels like it is narrowing into fewer options with a handful of owners. The White House has eliminated press passes for many media outlets, opting instead to only allow journalists who are sympathetic to the regime and who will be more likely to print their outlandish lies version of events. Even Pierre Poilievre’s team announced today that they would not be allowing journalists to travel the campaign trail with them, which is a break from what has historically happened (I will let you decide if their reasons are good ones).
Controlling the narrative has always been a goal of good PR but there is a line between convincing someone to see you in a favourable light and stifling opposing viewpoints to boost your own propaganda. I think the worse part of all of this is that we’ve done this to ourselves: we stay on platforms that we know harbour criminals and who do nothing to stop it. We go there knowing that misinformation is rampant and dissenting voices are suppressed. We know these companies have stoked violence and do little to stop harassment. These companies go against everything we stand for as people but yet we go and scroll for the memes, convincing ourselves that it is the only thing that keeps us connected because “everyone is there.”
At the Nuremberg trials famed Nazi Albert Speer said, “Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”
We say we want to save democracy but we can’t even stay off of twitter/Meta or cancel amazon Prime. It’s such an embarrassing low bar but yet, here we are. Enjoy your Volksempfanger.
* I cannot stop thinking about what happened to the men he wrote about in his book. What happened to them?
Authenticity in the age of the grift
Another day, another scam
PRM and the BIG MAD
Mr. Tucker has watched a Youtube channel called Punk Rock MBA periodically for a few years now. I watched a few videos myself but since it really isn’t music I dig, I never subscribed. In September 2024, he announced that he was leaving, posted one last video and then grabbed his toys and went home.
Ok, sure. That’s fair. Shit gets old. He’s onto other things now.
But when Mr. Tucker went to read the comments on the last video, he discovered some very, very, angry people. I guess an interview with the Punk Rock MBA guy dropped, gained traction and pissed a LOT of people off. This is the interview:
The TL;DR of it all is: he was only in it for the money. He was good at marketing, figured out what drew people in to watch, like and subscribe to his channel and when he met his financial goals, he peaced out. Some people were very understandably pissed off.
Although I’ve never been emotionally invested in his content, I can understand why people are. The key here is that our entire cultural communities are based on parasocial relationships. We get attached to communities and invested in like-minded people in a way that we feel some kind of ownership over them. So when they do things we find shocking, we feel angry and betrayed. Social media has ramped the problems with parasocial relationships up to 11.
Thanks to social media, the line that has historically been drawn between famous people and the Hoi Polloi has been deep: rarely did you know something about your favourite stars outside of magazines and tv. You never had access to people whose art you enjoyed like you do today online. There was this firewall of gatekeepers who fed us scraps of information via their content. But now everyone creates content and there is no longer that barrier.
Of course, there have always been fans who have gone too far. Keanu Reeves had his house broken into by a fan and John Lennon was murdered by a fan, to name some high profile examples. But these were before the internet had an absolute chokehold on interactions between fans and high profile people. In fact, with the advent of social media it has become a way to GET famous if you manage to get a viral post or two off the ground.
Chappell Roan enters the chat
Chappell Roan is a very interesting case. She started by playing small gigs and trying to leverage social media to gain traction for her music – like many artists who market their talents. But unlike 99.9% of artists, she had LARGEST leap to fame that I think anyone has ever had in such a short time. This does not mean she appeared out of nowhere – she was opening for Vance Joy 7 years ago and has been trying to get her music out there for a long time. But this chart has made the rounds and it is important to note just how huge she got in less than a year.
I feel like this essay by Eliza McLamb sums up a lot of it (found via Bernstein’s podcast, which is worth the watch: A Bit Fruity). What do you do with a stratospheric rise to fame? How do you manage it psychologically? In this day and age, the retort is always, “But this is what you asked for. It’s the price of fame.” But people are stalking her family at work, they’re stalking her and apparently she has even been sexually assaulted. I think we all need to figure out where the line is and unfortunately because some people are unable to even see that there is a line, the line must be very clear. Even then, as Eliza mentions in the podcast, Chappell Roan asking this of people is, “like trying to hold back the ocean” but she also says that Roan’s coming out and setting this boundary may carve a path for other artists in the future to also set boundaries for their own sanity.
The lines get blurry quickly from “big gay sleepover party” to “this is just my job” when your fanbase grows by millions and millions of people so quickly. Naturally, the parasocial relationship that drew people into her fanbase now feels like a betrayal when they learn that CR is not their friend and that the big hug they thought they were getting is now just an entertainment machine.
It’s Britney, bitch
We collectively have gone through a huge reckoning with the price of fame, most recently with the Britney Spears conservatorship. But I don’t think we have learned our lesson.
The entire world drove her insane, then we blamed her for what we did for her. The found of TMZ, Harvey Levin famously said, “Britney is gold. She is crack to our readers. Her life is a complete train-wreck, and I thank God for her every day.” This was a very normal thing to say in the Noughties but now it feels just gross, knowing what we know now. Heck, I didn’t even pay attention to her, or to magazines or tv and media in that decade and I still feel gross about being a part of the culture machine that abused her, allowed her children to be taken away by her lying ex-husband, forced birth control on her and then led to her indentured servitude where she was forced to generate money for her abusive family. If you have covid memory loss or live under a rock, Wikipedia has a great synopsis of this funhouse of horrors.
When all this came out we were horrified. #FreeBritney indeed. Freed she was from her conservatorship but fans still regularly call authorities to do wellness checks on her. I remember once I was served up a video of her dancing with a knife (her videos are mostly of her dancing!) and people were freaking out – and it was in the ramp up to Halloween! It was clearly meant to be seasonally-themed! But it’s yet another X against parasociality in the age of concern trolling. We get to directly affect her life by calling the cops to do a wellness check instead of TMZ being the intermediary of trauma…oh goody?
Blurred lines
Social media has commodified authenticity and I think for a long time there was sincerity there but it couldn’t stay that way when there was money to be made. Like the optimism in the 90s that the internet would be the great equalizer, I think people believed social media would do that as well, especially with art. Artists could build fanbases[1], get their art or music out to a worldwide audience and make a viable go at becoming somewhat famous but without the abusive intermediaries from before. I truly think it started to go downhill when these sites moved from chronological to algorithmic-based feeds. But not even the drama of the Cambridge Analytica scandal made people angry enough to leave.
But like frogs in the proverbial pot that is set to boil, these platforms demanded more and more. More reels/short videos, a more robust posting schedule, more engagement in the comments and DMs. The algorithm favours divisive posts and so the posts became more divisive. We were constantly feeding the beast and the beast devoured our time and energy but gave us less and less in return. People were complaining about shadow bans and other shady practices. Artists started complaining that they couldn’t do art and also keep up with the intense posting schedules that these platforms demanded of them just so that they would have their content served up to …the people who signed up for, and who actually want to see, their content. It boggles from a human point of view but not from an economic one: these platforms need you to keep churning out more and more free content for them so they can keep eyeballs on their apps and the advertising dollars keep rolling in. So if you aren’t creating content for them, they’re going to throttle what content you do share. So if the authentic folks are throwing in the towel, who is left?
Nature abhors a vacuum
Grifters. Grifters like PRM.
These folks peddle an air of authenticity and meanwhile clean up in the background on topics they just don’t give a flying fuck about. Humans are designed to trust and for a long time the internet sold us this narrative that you could do what you love AND be rewarded for it. So we just trusted that the creators who made videos about the things we loved, ALSO loved those things. We craved community and like-minded people but what we got was clever marketers who are sussing out what the people want and giving it to them.
But should we be mad at PRM? Afterall, we got the entertainment we were promised. He released finely tweaked videos devoid of opinion and substance so that we could imprint whatever feelings or beliefs we wanted to onto them. You have to admire the marketing skill, to be honest.
But conversely, he knew exactly what he was capitalizing on: people feeling a parasocial connection to a creator that they could relate to. An expert who loved the same music as they did and someone who felt comforting to watch. There is a reason that he wasn’t up front about his strategy from the get-go: he knew that people weren’t just looking for videos, they were looking for a community.
It’s fundamentally a pig butchering scam but cast with a wider net and no victims except the attention and time you spent watching the ads on his videos. Oh, and the betrayal some people feel for trusting.
The same need for community that Chappell Roan and PRM leveraged had two completely different outcomes: one flew too close to the sun like Icarus and got burned, and the other little piggy went “wee, wee, wee all the way home.”
Small f famous
Of course, between BIG B Britney and BIG C Chappell & me (not famous at all) is myriad of somewhat famous people who live a life that Eliza McLamb (in her essay linked above) calls, “cross the street famous.” The folks who can mostly go about their daily lives but who have 50K-2M followers on a variety of platforms. They can do their own groceries or go to a restaurant but at a film or music festival they’d probably get swarmed. I feel like these folks are in a more precarious situation in terms of stalkers or fan demands: they can survive on their art, but they can’t really afford a security detail.
I see a lot of these in-between folks bowing out of having an online presence for the most part. They’re still posting shows and events but I feel like if they don’t have to be a part of the social media circus, they won’t be. There used to be more personal twitter accounts, tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts that had behind-the-scene content that fans loved. But a lot of it has dried up in recent years and I think that is because some fans are so unhinged that it feels invasive. Parasociality has made the comments get weirder and weirder and I don’t blame folks for retreating from posting as fans (and haters) believe that they should be able to barf up the most horrible takes for the world to see.
A great example in that category of famous-but-can-probably-still-do-groceries I would put a band like Motionless in White[2]. A pretty solid following, a bunch of albums, tons of years of grinding/touring & they’ve built a pretty loyal fan base. A band in that category of folks who are big in their own genre but unheard of by most people on the outside.
This (shaky, poor quality but yet excellent) interview highlights that when you are small f famous, you still reach a point where you get all of the craziness of fame but without the benefits of big F fame. Of course, I will point out that Chappell Roan is a petite woman and Chris Motionless is a very tall man but this nutter called HIS MOM. She found their drummer’s phone number and even when confronted did NOT STOP. I have no idea how or if this situation was resolved but the absolute audacity of this person. Worse, the realization that you are dealing with someone who may not even have the capacity to understand is a mindfuck, too: what do you do with someone who doesn’t even comprehend that their behaviour is scary AF? It’s a funny story that makes for great interview fodder but there is darkness, too:
Look, I want to say for the record that I couldn’t really tell you what most of the musicians I enjoy look like out in the world, and I don’t follow them on social media. This is not some edgy flex, I am certainly not cooler than thou (and may I remind you that I trip over my own feet with alarming regularity?) I just don’t know them & I probably don’t want to. While I love music (what kind of psycho does not?) I have just learned that the phrase “never meet your idols” is just sound advice[3]. I would rather not care to learn that people whose music/movies/books I relate to are just unpleasant people, generally, let alone discover that they are absolute monsters[4]. But I get that some people make artists and scenes their entire personalities and I get why that happens: humans need community and for a lot of people that isn’t available to them in the meat space.
I know people think CR is a monster for boosting her career via social media, encouraging parasociality and then turning around and telling people to stop talking to her. But it is absolutely not the same when you have 20 thousand followers vs. millions. To put it into context, she has 6M people following her on instagram alone. That means that if she spent 1 minute with each of them, it would take her 4166 days or 11.41 years to greet fans. Who has that kind of time?
Paywall attention to the man behind the curtain
Clearly, boundaries are in order. But there are no clear boundaries when in the west we’ve watched Princess Diana get run off the road & killed in a car accident while being chased by Paparazzi. The laws are also still in flux in terms of rights to privacy. (But some scholars are arguing for better definitions)
In the CR debate, many people agreed with her in principal but disagreed that she shouldn’t expect people to not recognize her in public and talk to her. Like most things in the past 20 years, the internet has made things incredibly murky and having a social media presence where you’ve leveraged people’s connection to you, it seems very difficult to walk it back now that you’ve achieved superstardom. I think in CR’s case she had probably slogged it out in the trenches for a long time believing she may only reach small f famous so she was vastly unprepared for the Fame Slingshot ride to launch her straight into the stratosphere. It’s clear in her video that she is exhausted and angry that her life & her family to come under siege by rabid fans and unfortunately, the normal fans get swept up into the fray as well. I think that is where the disconnect is: normal people feel they shouldn’t be punished for the behaviours of a few bonkers folks but unfortunately: #yesallfans.
We have come to expect 24-7 entertainment for free, or for very little (being served up ads). We feel incredibly entitled to having everything from videos, music and art on demand when we want it (and we want it now!). So it’s not surprising that people feel entitled to creep into the DMs of, or demand hugs from, their favourite artists. It’s the culture we’ve created. It’s the kind of culture where clever marketers like PRM win, and art loses.
Since I have already simped for capitalism by having a blog marginally related to personal finance, I don’t think it will shock anyone to see that I think the only solution to this issue is: make people pay up.
I know it seems crass to reduce a fanbase to a monetary transaction, but I think it is the only fair way to manage. There are not enough hours in the day to answer every DM, meet every fan, and take every selfie with fans outside the venue. I am seeing more and more bands do fan meet-and-greets (and those usually come with other perks as well) or panels/talks at festivals and I’m not mad about it. I think KISS started it, ComicCons popularized it, and many bands are now doing it as well[5]. It always amazes me when people criticize these sorts of events for being a money grab but I ask these people: do you work for free? Yeah, probably not. A tour is work. I guarantee you when you are at work dreaming of all of the other things you could be doing, bands are also doing that except they don’t get to go home to their families after. I have many friends who love their jobs & even some who get amazing perks like travel and fine dining but even they wouldn’t do it for free.
You can love what you do. You can appreciate your fanbase. You can also recognize that there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy you have to give. It’s normal to admit that you are human and have human limits. Fans who say shit like this DM Eliza McLamb posted overstate their contribution:
You got what you paid for: a concert. What you are asking for: free overtime and emotional labour.
“You are not allowed to yell at me about this unless you pay me. That is the new rule.”
You bet I hit that subscribe button so fast!
What a delight it was to open BlueSky tonight and see this amazing exchange. I, myself, have used the line, “I don’t take homework assignments from strangers” whenever some Tech Bro wanted to have a Bad Faith argument on social media but I think this is way more effective.
Many more creators are putting their content either on Nebula, or in Patreon (and others) because of the penchant for trolls to do the most unhinged things from swatting to en masse reporting of videos, triggering demonetization. It hasn’t solved 100% of the issue – Contrapoints had to repost a video to their Patreon after a mass effort took down her unlisted GamerGate video. Fill your boots, I guess. She got it back up AND she has your $5. Win/win in the end, I suppose.
Caveat emptor
I don’t have a solution for “bad” actors like PRM, however. Trying to police authenticity online is trying to get grampa to stop talking to scammers on his landline. Grifters aren’t playing by the same rules. But if we go into it thinking that every creator is like a boy band: a fictional creation of a clever PR person, it should be ok. The Sex Pistols were, in fact, a clever creation and we still consider them a cultural touchstone…and who doesn’t love the Spice Girls?
We don’t get angry with journalists who write articles about things they don’t care about and I don’t think we need to make creators our entire personality, either. I mean sure, it is much easier to create something if you care about the topic but it isn’t a requirement. I think we have also blurred the lines between artist and creator. Nothing on PRM’s channel could actually be considered art. But people inferred art and inferred community where there was none. I actually feel sorry for people who are just trying to get a foothold in art or in even creating informative channels because the future isn’t looking very authentic. In a post-truth world, we should probably all assume that everything could just be an elaborate ruse.
Fundamentally, people are angry with PRM because they’re angry with themselves for getting sucked in. I think – especially after the last week – it’s time for us to realize that the only winners in the game of parasocial relationships are tech companies. Everything feels like it’s circling the drain and I wish I had a solution for artists and creators to get their stuff out there without all of us hopping onto the hamster wheel of selling our personal information and pulling down on the endless scrolling slot machine.
So Usenet or Blogrolls, anyone?
[1]Not just art, there have been a lot of people made famous by social media and Tim Ferriss talks about almost being kidnapped when he was still low on the famous totem pole. He wrote 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous in response to his experiences.
[2]So some background here: Metal isn’t a genre I know ANYTHING about. It’s Mr. Tucker’s thing and he enjoys different styles of the genre (why are there so many!?). I grew up with the Punk/Goth/Industrial kids and the Eldest was born in 2008 so I missed all of the fun metalmusic stuff that came out of that era. But I came across Shonalika’s video on how Goth is White which led to Gender, Power and Heavy Metal…and now all I’ve been listening to is In This Moment and Motionless in White for a month now. Kinda a genre made for refugees of those scenes, tbqh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[3] I read Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction when it came out. Way to retroactively ruin your own childhood!
[4]As I write this, Neil Gaiman is currently being exposed for being an absolute shitbag and quite frankly I am grateful to have never really resonated with his work as a teen. Gen X friends are positively beside themselves this week.
[5]I am not going to touch the state of the music industry here with its 360 contracts, nor will I address how promoters are offering VIP packages sans-band-meet.
(I honestly wish I remembered the HTML for footnotes but I don’t. I am having a hard enough time remembering that HTML writes “centre” the American way & it’s my #1 code mistake)
It’s you, PF community, not me
One of the things I have done this past December is cut down on the amount of Personal Finance blogs/Substacks, videos and podcasts that I consume. At the end of the day, most of the content out there is just splitting hairs for nerds or a rehashing of the same advice. I still enjoy it but honestly, I am well past the point where I GAF* about whether or not, for example, people should buy XEQT or VEQT and save cents on the dollar when we live in a world where most people struggle to even save $100. That isn’t the bottleneck for most people, the basics are. This isn’t shade to those creators – some people love those debates and love reading and writing about them. But I am done with the made-up hand-wringing of nothingburger questions.
Part of this is because we’ve made it: we’ve achieved our goals and quite frankly this content hasn’t been enjoyable for a while, so I am going to just stop. It used to be that I enjoyed reading that content because it felt nice to read people’s individual struggles when I was going through my own. But the other part is that the core tenets of personal finance haven’t changed in a really long time. Sure, the methodology and access to investments has changed but the basics of how to manage money has not really moved the needle since OG DJ Chuck D said, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.”
Another part of this is that I am just so sick and tired of the constant ads, amazon affiliate links, pop-ups and course offerings shilled by every website. Again, no shade to those creators at ALL: the bills must be paid and somewhere along the way we have collectively decided that user-hostile websites & affiliate links was the way we would pay for content. I actually prefer when creators write books because it feels satisfying to hold a book in my hot little hands (I have also bought books for my kindle, so that works, too). I think I just enjoy having all of the info in one place, offline. But it’s become off-putting when I hit a website where it’s pop-ups and ads skewing the window and there are so many affiliate links, calls to action and mediocre course offerings/coaching** that consists of someone just editing a mish mash of content you can find for free online and giving it a fancy new name, “It’s not a budget! We hates budgets, don’t we Precious! It’s Personal Accountability Tool!”
This is also just discussing people who I actually do give out good advice – established, intelligent folks who give advice that I may not agree with but is generally well thought out and competent. On the flip side, we have these TikTok Finluencers who have the most unhinged hot takes (enragement is engagement!) whose existence I generally try and ignore.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier: I am spending more time in the meat space. What happens when you achieve your goals? As it turns out, for me, the answer is to live a bigger life learning new things, doing more art, hanging out with more friends and trying new things. I no longer HAVE to sit in front of a computer for work so I don’t have the need to take short breaks to read posts or to listen to podcasts while I work. I think I kept up with a lot of websites and podcasts because it was good to have a few things in my back pocket to keep my brain busy when I was stuck in place. Then I just didn’t cull when I retired.
I eventually did start to scale back the content I was mainlining and worked on my social media use as well. Now, I have nothing but facebook now (marketplace and local communities keep me hooked and it’s just basically an address book now) which I only access by desktop.
I suspect I should write up what I believe are the core tenets of personal finance. So maybe that will be next. Or maybe my absolute frustration with Substack and the complete lack of viable business models for content. Or maybe authenticity vs. income.
Oh, and if you’ve read this far – Happy New Year!
*Give a fuck – shout out to my Oldhomies
**As an aside, I know a disproportionate amount of people who lost their jobs and became life coaches
Dear social media, it’s you, not me
After seeing the most eye-rolling, terminally online crap hot take this week, I made a decision: Instagram was next up on the list of shit that had to go.
I went ahead and deactivated Instagram and deleted the app from my phone. I discovered I was picking my phone up way too much to be distracted by videos and memes. Social Media has become a content regurgitation factory where so much of the content I am served is gleaned from twitter, threads, reddit and tiktok. I figure about 1/3 of it is also things I’ve already seen. So I am going to try this for a bit (maybe a month?) and see how it works out. Like most people, I use the phone when I am bored and anxious and Insta is my go-to (because I am old and don’t have tiktok).
Like many people, I am also wrestling with how social media fits into my life. I was reading this Spyglass article and this quote really stuck with me:
“People have long joked (and not joked!) that using social media makes them feel worse… Yes, there are funny tweets, but that’s increasingly because the network is a hive of stolen meme content from elsewhere (or other Xitter users). You see the same things that get engagement pop up over and over again just completely ripped off by other users. So even funny things feel bad!”
(The Bloomberg piece it references also is worth reading: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X)
I will be honest: as soon as I retired from the working world I deleted both Twitter and LinkedIn. But I am so emmeshed into the Meta properties that I find it difficult to extract myself. My Instagram use is pretty high even though I have seen the same funny videos, the same screenshots of funny tweets, reddit posts and the same hot takes over and over and over again. Because our personal social media account is a microcosm, I find so much content is shared and re-shared by many of my friends. So I may see the same video in different people’s stories 3+ times a day. That’s harmless when it’s a cute cat but how many times do I need to see violent or political content? Probably not that much. I probably don’t even need to see the cute cat that much, if I am honest. I figure since there is so much regurgitation in the things I see, maybe up to 1/3 of my time is spent rewatching things I have seen over-and-over-and-over again. I realized when I was going through my facebook memories that I had seen the same meme make the rounds again in the past week. I don’t even remember posting it the first time! That’s how many there are roaming around and 99% of them have the same qualities: funny but forgettable.
As for Facebook, I would completely divest but Nextdoor hasn’t really taken off in my area so all of my community info is gleaned from Facebook. Also, it still is the best way to organize events and sell things locally. I do however find myself de-coupling as much as possible. I have gone back through my memories and made as many as I can private posts and now I make anything I do post private within 24 hours. But I am posting rarely as facebook is just basically an address book to me now – and it shows. I have seen the reach of my posts plummet over the past few years the less I post. I also find I am not getting notifications like I used to. Sure, facebook used to hold back some notifications so that when you came back later it would show that you had a little red circle in the notification corner (from hours ago) and therefore you’d get more addicted to it. But the less you engage with the platform the less it seems to bother to tell you that you have anything at all. If I am waiting for a reply, it’s best to go to the post in question to see if there is one because facebook rarely tells me about it. It seems to be ghosting me as much as I am ghosting it.
Hilariously, as I was writing this a friend of mine posted this article to facebook (natch!) about the AI spamming happening on Meta’s platforms: Where facebook’s AI slop comes from. So another nail in the enshittification coffin for social media.
So now I have no social media on my phone at all and no Instagram accounts available to even access via browser. It is insidious though: since deleting the app, I find my fingers automatically go right to the place that the button once was. Muscle memory is pretty strong so I figure it may be a while until my brain finds no reward there and stops trying. Until then, I find myself staring down at my phone wondering why I opened the blur tool for photos.
I am cutting down on blog reading & some links
What I am currently reading
I have so many links in a variety of formats that I have enjoyed and have saved to make a post about. But by the time I get around to it, the links are generally older and posted elsewhere. Here is a few from this week:
“Dishabituation can be achieved in two ways. The first is to take a break—remove yourself from your environment for a period of time, however short, and then return to it without making any permanent changes…The second way to dishabituate…is to insert variety into your routines.” How to fight habituation
The U curve of happiness, is now a hump.Youth mental health declines in 82 countries
When life hands you unaffordable housing, build your own with friends.
“More chaos is coming, I fear. AI tools are making it easier and easier to manipulate images and videos. Every day, it gets easier to generate content that plays into people’s perceptual biases and confirms their prior beliefs — and easier to warp perceptions of the present and possibly even change memories of the past.” The internet peaked in 2015
Speaking of which, How to object to Meta’s AI data usage. Is it convoluted AF? Yes.
Speaking of F’s: one of the best things I have read this year is this essay: A unified theory of fucks.
I have drastically cut down on my social media usage – including the amount of blogs I am reading & youtube videos I watch. While I love to read a variety of personal finance blogs, the ratio of relevant information to ads/sponsored products has tipped over into the “not worth the hassle” category. I realized this weekend that one Canadian blogger I read has a 50/50 ratio of content to referral links. UGH. Don’t get me wrong: I am glad people are out there making their bag producing informative content for people. It just really isn’t worth my time anymore to read it because there really isn’t much new out there. On top of that, Instagram is now testing unstoppable ads. I haven’t come across them yet but it just may be the nail in the coffin there as well. I am only really posting pics to the account related to this blog because my personal account is overrun with things I can’t do much about, as I have written before.
I remember Amy Dacyczyn (of The Tightwad Gazette fame) used to compare her newsletters to Weight Watchers. Her argument was that people generally knew how to lose weight like they knew how to be frugal but the value was in the community and seeing other people do it, too. I think for a long time I consumed a lot of content based on that premise: it confirmed what I already knew and I got to read about similar people on a similar path. But now we have solidified our investment strategy, saved enough for Mr. Tucker to retire, paid off our house, saved enough for the kid’s post-secondary etc. with no plans to really change things up. Most debates that occur in the Finfluencer community are faits accomplis for me, so they aren’t really decisions that I am wringing my hands over anymore.
For example, I always joke to Mr. Tucker that when Ramit Sethi runs out of ideas, he runs a new video about owning vs. renting. Don’t get me wrong – his content is amazing – but CHRIST ON A CRACKER please save me from ever consuming any content on owning vs. renting ever again. It’s a personal finance dead horse as far as I am concerned. Do definitely read his book and watch his podcasts on Tuesdays with couples. Those things are great, especially if you are just starting out or need to change course. But I own a house, the house is paid off, and while I will happily sell it and become a renter if I need to someday, for right now that isn’t changing. (also, if you want to hear a pro-ownership argument Karsten at ERN does a really detailed one with a lot of numbers. In fact, his content is also fantastic if you like getting into the weeds)
Also, it helps that June has been a super busy month for us so far. For some reason we decided last minute to sort out our storage room that hasn’t been touched since we moved in and join the community garage sale. So we spent a week of evenings cleaning and sorting stuff. We told the kids that they could split whatever we made & they each made around $55. Not bad. The rest got sent to friends, the thrift store, or organized in bins to sell when the weather turns (it’s hard to sell snowsuits when its 30C out). We also happened to discover that our toilet was leaking so we had that fixed before it became a HUGE problem. So a small victory there as well. On top of that, dragon boat practice is twice a week, and The Eldest has a series of band events and job training to do. The Youngest is graduating from middle school and they also have many end of year field trips and events. So it’s a busy time for everyone – especially Mr. Tucker who is the maestro of everything. So I haven’t even really had a ton of time to read online content.
But we have been adding more fun stuff into our budget & reducing friction in our lives. More on that another day.
Much ado about a veggie tray
Sometimes the local community groups online are just a gift that keeps on giving. Currently, many people in the city are up in arms about this $44.99 veggie platter at Metro (TikTok vid). Like! Most! Hysterical! Social Media! Posts! This video is simultaneously true and also misleading.
If you put on your thinking hat, you realize that while what she is staying is correct – a 2.7KG pre-prepped veggie tray is $44.99 – a few tricks of the eye and mind are happening here. Thankfully, you can just pop online and search for the veggie tray and find it on the grocery store’s website. Here it is, with similar trays for comparison:
What people don’t seem to realize is that in our heads we all are imagining the medium tray because that is the tray that is a> most available in the stores; b> the one more commonly purchased. It also doesn’t help that they make the trays fit into the same size of square in the photos on the website, even though in person they vary. Every potluck I have been to features the medium veggie and/or fruit tray so it is the most ubiquitous and almost every grocery store sells the same one. So it is a bit of a trick of the eye which you can notice when she puts her hand down on the tray briefly: it is much larger than the medium size.
If you run the numbers, the veggie tray costs you $1.67/100g. If you look at grape tomatoes alone, they are $1.76/100g and carrots are probably the cheapest at $0.79/100g. Both of these are easy to toss onto a tray (which also costs money) unlike the celery, broccoli and cauliflower that requires processing which costs labour, also not factored into the dramatic balking at the price*.
I think the funniest part about VEGGIETRAYGATE is that if you lay out all of the trays beside each other – like I have in the image above – you can see quite clearly that you get a better selection/value of veggies, with dip, for $1.47/100g. So in my head that is the biggest scam of this entire debacle: buying more in bulk is costing the consumer more money! Along with Shrinkflation, this is one of my biggest pet peeves because it is designed to use our minds and habits against us.
It doesn’t help that Canada also has a long history of bread price fixing and a tumultuous relationship with the qu’ils mangent de la brioche Weston family that can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight for very long much to the chagrin of their PR folks, I am sure. These are their veggie trays which are very similar:
I am also not arguing that grocery prices aren’t high – after 10 years of almost no inflation we seem to have had all of the inflation in a short time span and it hurts, especially for people with the lowest incomes**. I also get that not everyone wants to drill down and do the math on the unit price – but also: the f*ckin’ unit price is right on the sticker! If you are going to be BIG MAD about something than at least be BIG MAD about it truthfully. Personally, I am more than happy to pay $24.99 for a selection of 8 types of veggies and some dip if I am pressed for time and off to a potluck event. A pre-washed and pre-cut tray of veggies packaged up for easy transport isn’t a necessity either. You can just make your own or you can vote with your dollars and just walk away.
I spend $50 easily on drinks when I am out. It seems to me that $44.99 for 2.7kg of veggies is a way better deal.
*Minimum wage is $16.55 in Ontario
**Hilariously, the OG video was taken in one of the richest suburbs in my city
The great enshittification
So I went on vacation last week to an all-inclusive resort. I haven’t been to a AIR since I was pregnant with the youngest -13 years ago – but I have been on luxury cruises and have stayed in high end hotels. I am currently working on a post about that but, I did write a fair but honest Tripadvisor review… that was promptly throttled. It took 3 days to “approve” my review so now it is buried 3 pages back while 5-star reviews were automatically approved. The review appeared after I made a scathing post on facebook. As the kids would say: SUS.
I did a bit of digging and it seems that I am not the only one who has experienced this phenomenon. Apparently Tripadvisor now partners with brands and that gives them more control over the kind of ratings & rankings they receive. After years of having a community-built model that enshrined trust in the website, it is now just another pay-to-play platform that prioritizes business over transparency.
This speaks to the larger phenomenon of what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of the internet. All of the platforms we have grown up with and contributed to have now been raked over by capitalism and our data and our eyeballs are sold to the highest bidder. Etsy is now just a slum of drop-shipping, Reddit (which, like Spotify, has never turned a profit) is selling its communities to the highest bidder to mine for AI, and even Bandcamp has been recently bought out and is moving towards maximizing profit and minimizing payouts to artists.
This topic seems to be ramping up lately, so here are some interesting links:
“We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.” Are we watching the internet die?.
“Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality,” he said in a podcast recorded in 2023.” The end of the MrBeast era: Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back.
“Everything used to work symbiotically. Then, those entities unceremoniously flipped to become extractors of the web, pulled up the digital drawbridge and never looked back. And all have been made significantly worse by doing this… They want your attention, intellectual labor and links (to them) all for free, but will not reciprocate even just your ideas if they’re external. They’re attention roach motels (traffic goes in, it does not come out). There is no ‘focus on the user’ any longer. Users like hyperlinks, which are internet lindy and a representation of our digital freedom: sharing what we want, with our online communities – links included. Personally I’ve witnessed this happen everywhere: my own links on social are shown to increasingly fewer followers, while posts without links do fine.” You aren’t upset enough about the war on hyperlinks: Our freedom to share links with our own digital communities has in many places already been taken from us.
This Apex Money post also has a link to two posts in r/professors that are a depressing read for anyone with kids. I have warned my own children about using AI for their schoolwork. But what is fascinating is that we have this happening:
Essay created with AI -> Essay run through AI detection scrubber before submission -> professors run essay through AI detection program AND AI detection scrubber detection program
Exhausting!
The Eldest has told me that some teachers have moved to only doing homework assignments in class, in pen, and submitted in person (not online) as they were experiencing so many ChatGPT submissions that it had become untenable.
Also, there is a great link to the Honest Broker in that post that I had also queued up to post here but is worth reading as well. The Rise of Dopamine Culture. I’ve seen it posted everywhere so it is definitely resonating with people.
I am still recovering from our trip – I don’t know if it is just a horrible reaction to mold or if it is something more serious like Legionnaires Disease (I wish I was kidding) but my breathing is horrible. If it doesn’t clear up by tomorrow I am off to the doctor’s. So much for our last HURRAH of a luxury vacation until the kids finish high school!