Vidcon 2017: Youtube & What Would Marshal McLuhan say? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14822308
Well this is pretty much a huge dumpster fire, but I find it interesting for what it reveals about people's immense unspoken ideological biases and of course the subject- cyber harassment, modern feminism, video games, right wing lunatics, youtube, etc- are somehow still current and driving people nuts on the internet.

Essentially Carl Benjamin, aka "Sargon" is a pretty annoying twat from Swindon, which, I happen to know, is one of the dreariest places on earth.

Benjamin is mainly known for making the appallingly stupid "this week in stupid" videos in which he basically spends 30 minutes complaining on youtube about trivial crap. Although he disingenuously claims to be a liberal, he unsurprisingly spouts alt-right talking points, often working himself into such a lather that he's actually screeching into his microphone.

He's also well known for having become a poster boy for the opposition to feminist icon and internet celebrity Anita Sarkeesian ,
who he made literally his first video about. He's stated that he has made at least 30 videos explicitly about her, so we can conclude that he's obviously obsessed, something to keep in mind for later.

You guys will of course recall Sarkeesian from that time The Sabbaticus posted a video by another guy about her basically doing the same thing, ie, complaining about her youtube videos.

So anyway there's plenty of whining and bitching and moaning going on here. Shit "escalated" when this nothing burger was brought to international youtube attention by the Vidcon 2017 gathering between June 21 and 24. During this otherwise probably pretty boring weekend with a bunch of youtube nerds, Sarkeesian was on a few panels discussing some shit, I don't really care, but the important one is the cyberbulling panel, which featured someother people including notable fatass youtube e-celebrity Boogie2988 (who apparently had a hit ordered against him on the dark web at one point).

Apparently what happened was that at an earlier panel, Carl Benjamin and his fellow douchebags intentionally occupied the seats in the row directly in front of the panel, prompting Sarkeesian to complain about their presence. Naturally professional victim Benjamin went ape and cried to high heaven about the abuses of power stemming from Sarkeesians apparent violation of the Vidcon TOS because Sarkeesian called him "a shithead." This was clearly a high point in Carl Benjamin's life as he was actually being acknowledged by his secret love, Sarkeesian, about whom, again, he made his first youtube video.

Controversy continued later at the cyberbulying panel, in which Boogie2988 made a closing statement telling his story about the hit ordered against him (or his wife, he changes his story). You can see his side of the event here:



Allegedly, after the panel was over, Sarkeesian approached Boogie2988 and became aggressive because she'd wanted to make some final points and wasn't able to because Boogie2988 kept blathering. Later they chilled in the greenroom and talked it out, apparently amicably.

So at this point the internet went into hysterics with countless hour long videos being made by people who would otherwise be considered raving lunatics endlessly expressing their outrage over nothing. Benjamin as expected made a one hour long video in which he rants about the hypocrisy of the vidcon organizers and so on, here


Carl Benjamin went on Joe Rogan a few days later and gave a long 3 hour interview in which he constantly talked over Rogan and demonstrated what an asshole he is. But anyway, of that interview, which is here, Benjamin, utterly unsurprisingly, spent a a great deal of his time rambling about Sarkeesian. The meat of that is here:



So. While I was distracting myself with this sorry but thankfully completely irrelevant non-affair I started thinking about Marshall Mcluhan and the nature of youtube as a medium.

There are basically two kinds of "programs" on youtube, large group productions which usually involve some kind of crew that produces regular content on some field of interest. These often involve a discussion or interview or some kind of talk-show like session such as the Joe Rogan podcast mentioned above. As I'm indicating these are almost exactly like the talkshow interviews of old.

However, there is also another kind of youtube video, specifically "channels"- usually about video games or politics- that tend to be filled with single issue losers doing things like talking about their interests in front of a camera for hours. It is these that I want to focus on here.

Needless to say this is a long way from the talkshow format- an opening monologue on Letterman is not going to run for an entire hour and lecture about the same issue over and over again. What is really going on here is that you now have a huge group of people who otherwise no one would care about who can now make long videos expressing the most uninformed opinions that will be endlessly gobbled up by the members of whatever particular echo chamber they happen to belong to.

It's as if some guy on the street started talking to you about Jesus and kept it up for several hours, more than once a week usually, and kept doing so for years.

I can't really liken this to a traditional lecture because of course people on youtube are usually failures academically since otherwise they wouldn't be on youtube. Also I don't think anyone could spend as much time as these people do talking about fucking video games and the drama that surrounds the video game industry.

What I'm getting at here is that youtube lecturers are generally trash but the medium (here is where Mcluhan comes in) gives them an aura of legitimacy, basically because someone isn't stoping them every few minutes to say, "wait, you sound like a crazy person," or "hmmm, I happen to know that what you just said is nonsense". Since they can just prattle on forever, the very fact that they are doing so begins to generate a momentum in which their ideas are then disseminated. I should also add that a lot of these people don't have actual jobs and are being funded by other anonymous internet people themselves usually crazy agenda seekers. As such, you would be a fool to listen to anything being said by someone on youtube who is just rambling into a camera/microphone.

Once you appreciate the nature of the medium it begins to make sense why the discourse is so toxic: it's because there is no discourse. You just have people making a bunch of statements, due to the nature of the medium, without any research or way of indicating their research at all, and then replying to eachother in other videos doing the same thing.

Tldr: DO NOT TRUST INDIVIDUAL YOUTUBE LECTURERS. Besides all of the sketchy shit that surrounds them (the anonymity of their financial backing, their connections with known psychopaths, their autistic obsession with video games), the videos they are making are literally destroying informed discourse faster than Twitter.

Bonus: known crazy person and Joe Rogan associate Alex Jones weighs in on Carl Benjamin, and the hugely important issue of gay fish, and in doing so exposes the toxicity of the discourse (and also of the water supply- buy one of Mr. Jones's water filters...), but also significantly the Rush Limbaugh radio-show like quality of youtube lecturers.

#14822383
Imagine living in a world where you actually took seriously the opinions of a basement-dwelling nerd from Swindon calling himself "Sargon of Akkad". :?:

MB. wrote:Essentially Carl Benjamin, aka "Sargon" is a pretty annoying twat from Swindon, which, I happen to know, is one of the dreariest places on earth.

I feel like your post could have ended there, to be honest. :lol:
#14822420
Your link doesn't work, Anita Sarkeesian is an intellectually effete youtube con-artist and the youtube talk-circuit is a waste of time, except for the 'Ruben Report' perhaps, which I don't watch, as I don't have time for Youtube drama. Not unless it's condensed to under four minutes, otherwise they can throw themselves off the nearest high-rise.

You might as well have spent your time writing about that 'famous' Minecraft player, who made a career out of making the most intellectually debilitating videos possible for five year olds. Apparently he made an absolute fortune. But he 'felt fake' because he couldn't swear and thus threw away an income stream of tens of thousands of dollars each month. And thousands of others are raking it in as well for pandering to the tastes of imbecilic cretins. E.g. Pewdiepie. Also a cretinous specimen who has found his little niche market: high school adolescents who like funny sounds.

The Ad-apocalypse couldn't have happened sooner. :lol: 8)
#14822424
You might as well have spent your time writing about that 'famous' Minecraft player, who made a career out of making the most intellectually debilitating videos possible for five year olds. Apparently he made an absolute fortune. But he 'felt fake' because he couldn't swear and thus threw away an income stream of tens of thousands of dollars each month. And thousands of others are raking it in as well for pandering to the tastes of imbecilic cretins. E.g. Pewdiepie. Also a cretinous specimen who has found his little niche market: high school adolescents who like funny sounds.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public." - HL Mencken.

:lol:
#14822498
Potemkin wrote:"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public." - HL Mencken.

:lol:

I thought that was P.T. Barnum? He was well before Mencken.
#14822506
Do you guys lack the required knowledge of Mcluhans media theory to make informed comments on the actual content of my post? Or are you just perfectly happy with the way Internet shit heads constantly complaining on YouTube are destroying informed discourse?
#14822543
MB. wrote:Do you guys lack the required knowledge of Mcluhans media theory to make informed comments on the actual content of my post? Or are you just perfectly happy with the way Internet shit heads constantly complaining on YouTube are destroying informed discourse?


Sorry, just killing time waiting for @Rhetoric Thug to reply. :D

Edit: Actually, I have never felt a need to visit any of these sites. I don't understand why people do. I can barely stand 5 minutes on any main stream media site without getting annoyed by the bias.
Last edited by One Degree on 11 Jul 2017 21:08, edited 1 time in total.
#14822549
MB. wrote:Do you guys lack the required knowledge of Mcluhans media theory to make informed comments on the actual content of my post? Or are you just perfectly happy with the way Internet shit heads constantly complaining on YouTube are destroying informed discourse?


Actually the internet discourse is not that far apart from real world discourse. It is influenced roughly by the same processes. Currently in the US and UK the political parties are in a Crysis of Definitions(Gridlock?).

So people like Anita Sarkesian represent the American "Left" with their "New Post-Impearialist Person" (Reads as man or women here) project.

While Sargon represents the usual "Conservative" or "Alt-Right" narrative.

They are not exactly destroying it but they simply have no foundation right now. World is not split between Communism and Capitalism anymore where there is a clear divide and it is really hard to shitpost and say "Hey, Why we not use the FInancial Market in a communist society" or " Why we not nationalise the financial market". Currently there is only capitalism/liberalism and the variation of it. So for somebody to be sucesful in a political narrative, they need to define themselves clearly. This is also happening on this forum by the way. This is why posters like Ixabert, Rei, Qatz etc are popular.

So in this crysis of defyning themselves they are injecting some elements of other ideologies to liberalism that produces non-sense. Or at least something that i think will not bring any concrete results.

Simplistically and stupidly put:

"Alt-Right" is toying with liberalism with a splice of national socialism.

"The Left" is toying with liberalism with a splice of globalism and socialism.
#14822565
MB. wrote:Benjamin is mainly known for making the appallingly stupid "this week in stupid" videos in which he basically spends 30 minutes complaining on youtube about trivial crap. Although he disingenuously claims to be a liberal, he unsurprisingly spouts alt-right talking points, often working himself into such a lather that he's actually screeching into his microphone.


He does not disingenuously claim to be a liberal. Just because he doesn't agree with all of your personal opinions or holds some conservative or right-wing views does not mean he is not a liberal.

He's also well known for having become a poster boy for the opposition to feminist icon and internet celebrity Anita Sarkeesian ,
who he made literally his first video about. He's stated that he has made at least 30 videos explicitly about her, so we can conclude that he's obviously obsessed, something to keep in mind for later.


He also has hundreds of other videos which are not about Sarkeesian. Furthermore, just because he made 30 videos about something over the span of (how long has been on youtube?) five years does not mean he is "obsessed". There are academics who will spend 30 YEARS writing about Napoleon Bonaparte.

You guys will of course recall Sarkeesian from that time The Sabbaticus posted a video by another guy about her basically doing the same thing, ie, complaining about her youtube videos.

So anyway there's plenty of whining and bitching and moaning going on here. Shit "escalated" when this nothing burger was brought to international youtube attention by the Vidcon 2017 gathering between June 21 and 24. During this otherwise probably pretty boring weekend with a bunch of youtube nerds, Sarkeesian was on a few panels discussing some shit, I don't really care, but the important one is the cyberbulling panel, which featured someother people including notable fatass youtube e-celebrity Boogie2988 (who apparently had a hit ordered against him on the dark web at one point).

Apparently what happened was that at an earlier panel, Carl Benjamin and his fellow douchebags intentionally occupied the seats in the row directly in front of the panel, prompting Sarkeesian to complain about their presence. Naturally professional victim Benjamin went ape and cried to high heaven about the abuses of power stemming from Sarkeesians apparent violation of the Vidcon TOS because Sarkeesian called him "a shithead." This was clearly a high point in Carl Benjamin's life as he was actually being acknowledged by his secret love, Sarkeesian, about whom, again, he made his first youtube video.


Oh no! THE HORROR!!! :eek:

This proves that Carl Benjamin is LITERALLY HITLER!

tl;dr the rest of this stupid shit.
#14822573
That was the worst post I've read today, Saeko. I wonder why you'd rush to the "defence" (amounting to bolding some of my posts and spouting Wrong!) of someone on the internet who make youtube videos literally entitled "this week in stupid"? I should add that I was quoting Joe Rogan who pointed out in his interview with Benjamin that he seems like a man obsessed. I'm glad YOU pulled Godwins law here too, I should add for no reason.

Do you really think this guy, who literally wears 4chan t-shirts and spends all of his time trolling people for their opinions is a liberal? How divorced from political reality are you by the echo-chamber of the alt-right?

Pretty embarrassing on your part that you didn't even try to respond to the actual thrust of my post either (ie, why is the discourse so toxic, and what does this tell us about youtube as a medium). Sad.
#14822600
What I'm getting at here is that youtube lecturers are generally trash but the medium (here is where Mcluhan comes in) gives them an aura of legitimacy, basically because someone isn't stoping them every few minutes to say, "wait, you sound like a crazy person," or "hmmm, I happen to know that what you just said is nonsense". Since they can just prattle on forever, the very fact that they are doing so begins to generate a momentum in which their ideas are then disseminated. I should also add that a lot of these people don't have actual jobs and are being funded by other anonymous internet people themselves usually crazy agenda seekers. As such, you would be a fool to listen to anything being said by someone on youtube who is just rambling into a camera/microphone.

Once you appreciate the nature of the medium it begins to make sense why the discourse is so toxic: it's because there is no discourse. You just have people making a bunch of statements, due to the nature of the medium, without any research or way of indicating their research at all, and then replying to each other in other videos doing the same thing.

It really reminds me of TV itself in that any time I stop watching TV for a bit and have come back to see the types of shows on it. It's disgusting and utter shit that I wondered how I was able to waste any time on it and was entertained other than the thought that it was aversion to everything else and to fill up boredom in not doing anything.
Listening to someone on youtube isn't necessarily all that better than those on TV, here in Australia we got a fuckwit Andew Bolt, in the states they had their Rush Limbaugh's, Bill Maher and other figures to talk shit for people's entertainment. And I think that's it, that it is merely entertainment regardless of how substnative it's content is that functions well for a society in which the economy dominates aspects of our civil life.
These youtube pricks are the new business of keeping people touched on with images.
And something that really stood out to me in someones explanation of story telling for Rick and Morty was how TV unlike movies communicates the sense that nothing changes or if it does it will return back to normal. Because television is meant to be perpetual to keep one watching it forever, so real character development or what ever only happens at a finale, which is simply expected in a movie.
In the third Batman movie by Nolan, Batman fakes his death and lives out a 'normal' life, on TV his character receptively fights the joker and other villains in Gotham over and over.
Similarly, youtube has such repetition, clearly filling something for the person, whether its a real weak substance of entertainment or it justifies their feelings of Grrr them dumb bastards over there done did this and have a fever of emotion as it can feel good to be emotional, upset, excited, its stimulating.
And in this it all makes money, people are making careers out of youtube stuff and in a way it has helped a lot of cool content in that it initially democratized the market and reduced the middle man in TV of having a producer and shit. But now even youtube has significant production value in some of it's stuff, people's careers are on youtube. I think of the Vlogbrothers who do other things but they in a sense have all sorts of shows that are like mainstream American educational videos and are often sponsored by PBS.

But in the realm of the medium is the message, I think to a shallow thought of Guy Debord of how life is subordinated to the 'spectacle'.
http://www.antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society%20_Of%20_The%20_Spectacle.pdf
The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated ­­ and precisely for that reason ­­ this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

http://akashainnovation.org/the-medium-is-the-message-and-what-does-a-fish-know-of-the-water-in-which-it-swims/
Nearly half a century has passed since the French philosopher, Guy Debord, warned that mass media had replaced religion in offering repressive pseudo-enjoyment of the world. Real life has become subordinate to its mediated appearance. “The medium is the message,” declared Marshall McLuhan around the same time. Few appreciated the significance of the statement back then, but now we bear witness to rapid changes in the way we relate to each other and our planet. Debord and McLuhan joined a line of critical thinkers, from Walter Benjamin to Jean Baudrillard, in warning that our “mass age” is defined and numbed by the form of media as much as its content. It would be a mistake to assume that a new generation has become enchanted by bite-sized pieces of what passes for entertainment rather than the platforms that deliver them. Narcissus of Greek mythology, according to McLuhan, did not just fall in love with his own image; he fell in love with image.


Youtube is perhaps an example of this expansive spectacle and its reach is far further than any TV of the past in it's advertising and people watching it for hours a day.
Things are much faster on the internet and youtube has become a replacement of TV itself. And there's people who even make something out of taking the piss out of these people, so many youtubers are just offshoots of others who capitalize on their hate.

Like how there's an industry that feeds of off celebrities lives.
And then the whole culture of piss taking with remixes and that, I love watching the remixes of Alex Jones because he's just hilariously entertaining and that gets views.
And what matters at the core for youtube than getting views, subscriptions and all that shit that so many mention at the end or their videos after they've used similar styles to communicate their thoughts on other shit on youtube or what ever.
So after just rambling lots I'd speculate that if there's much toxic about youtube, could just speak to the general behaviour on the internet of anonymity the speed in which it happens which is simply too fast for people, too fast to feel or think.
https://www.guernicamag.com/john_berger_7_15_11/
The prison system operates thanks to cyberspace. Cyberspace offers the market a speed of exchange which is almost instantaneous and used across the world day and night for trading. From this speed, the market tyranny gains its ex-territorial license. Such velocity, however, has a pathological effect on its practitioners: it anesthetizes them. No matter what has befallen, “business as usual.”

There is no place for pain in that velocity; announcements of pain perhaps, but not the suffering of it. Consequently, the human condition is banished, excluded from those operating the system. They are alone because utterly heartless.

SO like the TV never changing philosophy because one needs to keep watching, kept on the merry go round which hopefully simulates some emotional fevor in you that is addictive because it's a small amount of excitement in one's life, because what can be more constantly over stimulating than the friggin' internet as an enhanced version of the already over stimulating TV.

On another tangent, I have to wonder that these figures are people who always existed in the past, like people who talk a lot of shit and others get around them but it just so happens its more accessible.
Like Bill Burr's joke about crazy people taking over, fuckwit 1# overhears fuckwit 2# and agrees with them then they get together. Which is just typical of humans in general seeking out those that are like minded no matter the substance, its affirming to have your sense of reality validated.
It's just accessible that many of us on here who expressedly may not personally like these individuals get exposed. It's like how i don't give a shit about Kardashians yet here I am, knowing that they exist and end up learning all sorts of shit and I have to wonder just how friggin' good the internet and people talking about it is at spreading it to me someone who passively avoids it. Spend enough time on the internet and bound to end up hearing about these sort of figures, we all have some awareness of Anita Sarkeesian because of shit that happened on the internet but did we necessarily seek her our? Such people get the sort of exposure some people could only dream of for their own content. Hell, Anita's youtube career or what ever was boosted by the hate from angry people like Sargon created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
And there's a buck to be made in fostering both sides. It reminds me of a funny story heard about Elvis Preseley where apparently there was I love Elvis Presley button pins or what ever being sold and Elvis and friends made I hate Elvis Presley Pins and sold them, making a buck out of his haters. Friggin' dollar to be made out of anything even those that hate you, everything can be commodified and made a show that rouses people's emotions and drags them on like Pavlovian dogs.

But as arrogant as I can be in seeing some others in this way, I'm wary in that I don't see myself outside of this stream of influence and if anything just as vulnerable.
I am a person who is emotional driven and doesn't have a constant awareness of my environment and so I do what I want but I am not aware what influences what I want and that is a constant vulnerability. It's easy to be swept up by emotions and brought into this sphere, where we're playing a part. It's why when people do something I dislike I often refrain from commenting at all because complaining about people complaining who are complaining about someone else just plays a part that when I think about it I don't want to play in, but if they jolt some feeling one can just seamlessly end up spouting shit as well because its so easy and fast.
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/my-papers/subject-ego-person/
Spoiler: show
Kierkegaard’s concept of the self represents a religious idealization that is characteristic for the 19th century emphasis on the individual. Marx unveiled it as a bourgeois ideology if seen in the context of historical materialism. Kierkegaard’s individual is a lonely figure; the rootedness in society is not part of its definition. Our experience is different: today people are socialized into masses; and human sciences concern themselves with the prediction, the shaping, and the disciplining of behavior. The process of socialization has itself become a focus of political and economic interest, and, as a result, individual characters and biographies are formed according to the needs of society. The values of today are all related to the needs of the collective: team spirit, hard work, and consumer mentality. What we tend to forget is the fact that the transformation of society into a social machinery becomes a necessity for the reproduction of society in its given form. The “culture industry” knows how to reproduce and utilize our deepest fantasies. The flow of information is filtered in such a way that serious alternatives to the existing system never come into sight. The idea of democracy is endangered through a process that manufactures public opinions. This machinery works as long as it is veiled. People need the illusion of individualism, of unique subjectivity, in order to function as isolated individuals who are not aware of the degree to which they are integrated into the capitalistic totality of the market. In this respect, the idea of the uniqueness of the subject has become a marketing tool, exploited by the cynicism of the rulers: the way to the realization of this dream consists in getting rich.

Lacan makes it clear that psychoanalysis does not function in the service of this machinery. “To make oneself the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness even in analysis is a form of fraud. There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream.” 27 He declares that the totalizing integration of man into a maximally expanded public sphere requires the sacrifice of desire, and that psychoanalysis works against this amputation – it will explore what (and whose) desire the subject really pursues.

“I think that throughout this historical period the desire of man, which has been felt, anesthetized, put to sleep by moralists, domesticated by educators, betrayed by the academics, has quite simply taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for knowledge… Science, which occupies the place of desire, can only be a science of desire in the form of an enormous question mark, and this is doubtless not without a structural cause. In other words, science is animated by some mysterious desire, but it doesn’t know, any more than anything in the unconscious itself, what that desire means.” 28

As the “science” of desire and jouissance, psychoanalysis is the correlate to conjectural sciences. It starts with the discovery that human behavior and subjectivity are ruled by an unconscious will, and this discovery permanently damages the traditional theoretical perspective. We have reached a historical point where we realize that the search for meaning does not coincide with the quest for more knowledge. What binds them together is human desire, but its meaning remains unknown to us. The answers which we find in the search for more knowledge, only produce more questions. We find ourselves in the remote corner of a universe that resembles a construction zone of gigantic proportions, and we are, most likely, not even alone in it. But all this knowledge is useless when the question of desire is raised. At the most, it forces us to pursue the question with increased intensity. Religions give us speculative answers, but they, too, require the sacrifice of desire to the Other (God) in the hope of some future jouissance. Psychoanalysis allows a deciphering of the individual’s desire; in this regard it gives back to the individual what is most precious for it and completes what was already anticipated in the concept of the “person” throughout the centuries.

I don't think it's a case that one can necessarily be outside such things, especially if one already has an awareness and so know that subject to some influence even if it's not one that is praiseworthy and see ourselves above it. But its now in us, and it's concerning to see how much shit you come to be aware of by no effort of your own and wonder what effect it has had on you.
I don't know how I feel or what I think about that the OP makes sense clearly in that I'm aware of all those people mentioned, Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Anita Sarkeesian, Sargon and Boogie. And here we are thinking about them some more because they're in our sphere online, people around the world have similar points of reference as we're all exposed to the same visuals/communication. Without a shared social reference it'd make no sense, which speaks to some of the spread in which things like youtube have as a consequence of the internet's capacity.

Fortunately I think a lot of people aren't like many of the alt-righters i've experienced who shitpost memes and youtube videos of pricks no one else cares about as constitute of their opinions for discussion. Though I do see many liberals who have often seem to play a similar role of their tone. But trying to rise quality of discussion is difficult as it takes a lot of time and work to be able to form opinions based on some basis of perceived knowledge. And it's hard to have an opinion on that which haven't dwelled on that much except, for myself, some rambling shit with reference to a few people that might prompt others to give deeper and more insightful piece of their significance on the matter.
But, entertainment, making a buck because commodifying shit is the 'human' way and doing it all at such a speed that one can barely feel it unitl step outside it long enough, sounds great for a sort of timelessness stuck in shit, numbed to the world locally outside one's screen.
#14822620
Wellsy wrote:And something that really stood out to me in someones explanation of story telling for Rick and Morty was how TV unlike movies communicates the sense that nothing changes or if it does it will return back to normal. Because television is meant to be perpetual to keep one watching it forever, so real character development or what ever only happens at a finale, which is simply expected in a movie.
In the third Batman movie by Nolan, Batman fakes his death and lives out a 'normal' life, on TV his character receptively fights the joker and other villains in Gotham over and over.
Similarly, youtube has such repetition, clearly filling something for the person, whether its a real weak substance of entertainment or it justifies their feelings of Grrr them dumb bastards over there done did this and have a fever of emotion as it can feel good to be emotional, upset, excited, its stimulating.


I thought this was an interesting comparison that hadn't crossed my mind. The notion of television shows as a perpetual medium in which the ultimate message is about ineffectualness. As you put it, everything simply returns to normal, thus reaffirming the status-quo as both desirable but also inevitable.

I recall Rhetoric Thug has previously posted this interview with McLuhan in which he criticized the 1976 presidential debate as failure to appreciate the nature of the medium



Significantly, McLuhan's analysis suggests that modern youtube medium is actually similar to the "failed" appreciation of television as a medium in the 1976 debate. McLuhan suggested that rather than have two people just standing their talking past each-other, they should have utilized the medium to have more informed discussion and debate. It strikes me that this is almost exactly what youtube is like: people basically talking past eachother in their videos.

Consider the formal debate arranged between Benjamin and Winters that was mentioned in the (amusing) video Wellsy posted



I at least consider this a proper debate, in the sense that the lecturers are not talking about strawmen but actaully discussing an issue with eachother. Further, the moderators have tabulated all the research which provides a much clearer way for a third party to analyze the debate. In sum, this seems like an appropriate use of the medium- taking advantage of the internet to bring people together to discourse rather than shouting into an echo chamber. But this definitely seems like the exception rather than the rule. Does this mean that youtube as a medium is first and foremost a constructor of strawman and echo-chambers, and is that poisoning the discourse? I contend that it is.
#14822628
There is no way to rewrite her childish temper tantrum at vidcon. It's all cut and dry. Rules were broken, fellow panelists and guests were verbally assaulted in public, and the vidcon organizers failed to act on their own rules.

Deflection is the theme I see, but when you deflect the responsibility of her actions onto others (granted she has the mind of a child, maybe you can take this route), make sure you're playing with facts.

Sarkeesian is a bullying ideologue, has never uttered a coherent argument in her public life. Just a dispenser of defunct, self-centered drivel which shores up her profitable victim status ventures and her criminal scams on kickstarter. This is the same imbecile who went to the UN to try and get criticism online classed as harassment.

Sargon actually makes meticulous, compelling arguments. And he's a liberal, not right-wing-that being in no way relevant to his content which can be judged on its own. Some of his videos are over an hour long, because he puts research behind them. He only tells it like it is, and doesn't shut down his comment sections like scamkeesian has to because a child could destroy her ramblings in a debate. His videos barely mention her, out of hundreds he's made about 4 regarding her, and they all address her drivel, and offer up valid criticisms of the content and her professional character, never her person. He deconstructs entire sentences, corrects entire videos if something is erroneous, etc. To sully his personal character, maybe find legitimate fault in the way he conducts his own criticism.

TLDR; Sargon attends vidcon talk to hear what she has to say, sits down, keeps his mouth shut. Scamkeesian notices him, assaults him on camera. Later she also assaulted boogie, the wheelchair ridden, big fat teddybear who gets panic attacks in public, after he dared to mention that people of all races and sexes can be victims, on her panel. Now she's the victim. Que SJW's across the internet trying to bolster this scamming bully.

One of the organizers of vidcon is a raging sjw manlet, he actually defended her assault of a paying customer by refusing to kick her out after she broke vidcon rules. This sets the precedent that you are open to abuse at vidcon from batshit insane panelists, if they happen to be in the club. Many big youtubers have promised not to attend again, will instead set up their own conference.
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The main premise of you rant is unsubstantiated. Youtube doesn't give an illusion of legitimacy onto what anyone says, everyone is aware that anyone with a camera can record a video. I don't really see what it is you are complaining about here. If you were personally fooled as you thought everyone on Youtube is some sort of expert that is your own problem MB. Most intelligent people are not nearly that gullible. People like Igor who worship basement dwelling rodents and hang on their every world would be just as easily fooled by any other medium (psychical text, text on a normal website, face to face conversation etc) as they are on Youtube.

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