I got through maybe a third of this article before I got exhausted. Who has time to delve into the drama of random people on the internet's interpersonal relationships with other random people on...
I got through maybe a third of this article before I got exhausted. Who has time to delve into the drama of random people on the internet's interpersonal relationships with other random people on the internet? Nothing about this level of social dissection is healthy or productive in any way.
This internet culture war stuff has just gotten so circlejerky with commentators commenting on commentators commenting on commentators. What are we even talking about anymore? Do none of us have hobbies?
It has always been like this, forum/irc drama existed forever. Now it's just even more amplified by microblogging blurbs and follower tribal mentality of 2019. Youtube drama is a microcosm of its...
What are we even talking about anymore?
It has always been like this, forum/irc drama existed forever. Now it's just even more amplified by microblogging blurbs and follower tribal mentality of 2019.
Youtube drama is a microcosm of its own, think Logan Paul, Pewdiepie and cases like that, people make careers out of it. It's an easy way to generate clickable outrage content out of nothing.
I posted this article because I was frustrated with the internet churn of somebody doing a dumb thing and doubling down. That may have made a mistake since it is founded on drama, and hasn't...
What are we even talking about anymore? Do none of us have hobbies?
I posted this article because I was frustrated with the internet churn of somebody doing a dumb thing and doubling down. That may have made a mistake since it is founded on drama, and hasn't really added a bunch to this conversation, but the idea of LeftTube existing as it's own marketing, rather than the end all be all of left theory is an interesting thesis. It's easier to critique what's out there than to build something yourself, and the internet makes it easier still, so when people get big and highly marketable, it's easy to throw rocks at them or the people attacking them and feel like you have made a better world. Ergo it's marketing.
Whew lad: Or perhaps because Left Unity is the only way to defeat the monolithic block of the right? Maybe because the right loves to cause Left Disunity by amplifying the kind of infighting this...
Whew lad:
They’re probably so worried about culture because you have to be white to unironically believe in Left Unity.
Or perhaps because Left Unity is the only way to defeat the monolithic block of the right? Maybe because the right loves to cause Left Disunity by amplifying the kind of infighting this article is about?
But BreadTube is not a Leftist movement. It’s a market created by capitalism to sell Leftists stuff.
Which stuff? More leftist content? Because most of these BreadTubers don't put ads in their content and fund almost entirely off of Patreon. So...what stuff are they selling? And afaik, unless there are ads on the videos, YouTube doesn't make money directly from said content.
Then, he goes into social capital, which, IMO, stumbles directly into a discussion about whether such behavior is a product of capitalism, or if it is some deeper tendency in human behavior to want to follow strong leaders. In capitalism, this is indicated by people with lots of money, but in a society without such mechanisms to hoard wealth, cults of personality and amassing social capital would still occur.
So it seems to come down to: is BreadTube primarily a de-radicalizing tool, or is it a discussion space for leftist discourse? Are those in it immune from criticism simply because it's a de-radicalization tool above all else?
Or can we perhaps come together to realize that as long as our primary discussion spaces are anonymous and centralized, any misstep (and let's be clear here, these are missteps. Nobody is perfect, nobody can be expected to capitulate 100% of the time if they hold a view, and especially not if the primary means of contributing to the discussion is sending death threats to those who don't hold the "right view", and nobody can be expected to have all the right information all the time) can and will be amplified by those who are more interested in causing and continuing chaos than they are actually coming to a concerted point.
And that's part of why this whole discussion kind of misses the point: the only reason we can criticize Natalie so heavily and so readily is because she puts out content that other people view and doesn't simply sit behind an anonymous username and post degrading shit about others. Is there a certain filter that causes certain personality types to get into YouTubing in the first place? Absolutely. Is that primarily driven by Capitalism? Unless we have a solution for preventing people from amassing social capital, which, IMO, is impossible, then we have to realize that this is a bigger issue than "It's Capitalism's Fault". This is brushing up on certain aspects of sociology and human behavior that might be fundamentally at odds with anonymous, large, public, online spaces.
Certain forms of leftism are mutually exclusive. You can't have syndicalism at the same time as you have Stalinism. As Seder calls it "the self-satisfaction of supporting the Majority Report."...
Left Unity is the only way to defeat the monolithic block of the right?
Certain forms of leftism are mutually exclusive. You can't have syndicalism at the same time as you have Stalinism.
what stuff are they selling?
As Seder calls it "the self-satisfaction of supporting the Majority Report."
human behavior that might be fundamentally at odds with anonymous, large, public, online spaces
Fundamentally at odds or fundamentally unskilled, unprepared etc?
is BreadTube primarily a de-radicalizing tool, or is it a discussion space for leftist discourse?
Por que no los dos? Is there some aspect of one that mutually excludes the other? In theory a "movement" (cringe) predicated on the study and discussion of anarchist socialist theory and praxis is the end point of development toward libertarian, egalitarian modes of thought. In practice there seem to be breadtubers at all stages of this progression with a heavy emphasis on those not directly dealing with "the bread."
In this way, breadtube does reflect a market in that the supply for content is rising to meet demand. There are more socdems, centrist consensus liberals, radicalized shitlords etc. than there are people who have read, been introduced to conquest of bread. So, the supply of videos skews heavily in that direction. Some middle tier tubers like ThoughtSlime, Non-Compete, LibertarianSocialistRants, et al. do traffic in this but not exclusively and as a minority. Socially, monetarily it is more capitally incentive to produce such content because of the algorithm.
those who are more interested in causing and continuing chaos than they are actually coming to a concerted point
This seems like falsely ascribing intent when ignorance is perhaps a more likely explanation. Many people in these outrage mobs are probably newly arrived at their positions and/or are basking in the glow of social approval for saying these things. Part of the value I find in this piece is that it introduces to these people (I hope) a novel concept: that the point is not contra, contra, contra, but to contextualize your outrage in a larger conversation and to talk about that.
This granular, missing the forest for the trees discourse is certainly a much wider practice than the converse. In my mind, I try to think of these outrage mob people in the context of who they used to be and who they might become if so empowered. I doubt these people were screaming and throwing tantrums about non-binary erasure by public personalities as children. It seems credible the claim that a future stage of this progression for many people will be the contextual analysis of cultural, economic, and political episodes - should we choose to normalize the practice.
As someone with no background info or exposure to pretty much any of this, the TL;DR in the article and linked video given as explanation were quite opaque. In my search to make sense of them, I...
As someone with no background info or exposure to pretty much any of this, the TL;DR in the article and linked video given as explanation were quite opaque.
In my search to make sense of them, I found this article which I think does a good job of explaining the controversy in detail, for those of us that are out of the loop. It helped me much better understand all the meta-discourse surrounding this.
EDIT: There's still a missing piece for me. The linked article says the following:
In ["Opulence"], she implies that part of the reason some non-binary people seem to dislike her so much is that they’re envious: that, through her focus on her “glow-up game” (as she puts it) and her hyper-feminine presentation as a trans woman, she sets a standard that others no longer want to feel pressured in emulating.
The article I found didn't address this at all, and it's been too long since I watched "Opulence" to remember specifically what it's referencing (nor do I have time to sit down for 45 minutes to suss it out). As written, it sounds like Natalie's typical humor, tossing out a clearly self-aggrandizing statement as a sort of reverse self-deprecation, though it's hard to tell since I'm going at this off of a second-hand summary of an implication. That's quite shaky ground. Can anyone shed light on this particular element for me?
I fucking hate internet drama. I wish computers crashed more often, then maybe people would be forced to leave twitter behind for ten minutes and go outside and look at a tree or something. I'm...
I fucking hate internet drama. I wish computers crashed more often, then maybe people would be forced to leave twitter behind for ten minutes and go outside and look at a tree or something.
I'm obviously joking. But seriously - don't people see how harmful in-fighting is when it comes to actually achieving progressive aims in the real world? Cancel culture and woke purity-testing is the People's Front of Judea of the internet age.
In this case, there was no in fighting. Contrapoints platformed someone she shouldn't have because she was ignorant of the criticisms of this person. Then she released a statement saying she had...
don't people see how harmful in-fighting is when it comes to actually achieving progressive aims in the real world?
In this case, there was no in fighting. Contrapoints platformed someone she shouldn't have because she was ignorant of the criticisms of this person. Then she released a statement saying she had learned and would not have done so again knowing what she knows now.
Ooh! Culture spicy wars content! My favorite! I'm very glad that this ended up not being a piece about Contra. I think here apology was fine and that a broader conversation about transmedicalism...
Ooh! Culture spicy wars content! My favorite!
I'm very glad that this ended up not being a piece about Contra. I think here apology was fine and that a broader conversation about transmedicalism is more productive.
Mo's point about BreadTube being a market for deradicalizing internet reactionaries is a good one and that consuming it passively is not praxis. I've been off the subreddit for a a couple months since I kept getting downvoted for bitching about lack of ideas and an over abundance of Ben Shapiro takedowns. But in the context of this piece I see now that I was missing the part where these creators are targeting centrist consensus liberals and not leftists.
The call to action and to read books at the end was a nice touch but again, as most leftist calls to action these days, lacked substance, vision, and pertinence to any sort of overarching goals for a leftist project. Many talks about system change but the emerging discourse about what that system should be doesn't seem to be happening en masse yet.
This is 100% Culture War byproduct, but kind of an interesting take on the parasocialization of YouTubers, irony of capitalism creep into leftist discourse circles, and why you don't Tweet your...
This is 100% Culture War byproduct, but kind of an interesting take on the parasocialization of YouTubers, irony of capitalism creep into leftist discourse circles, and why you don't Tweet your heroes.
This article is about what constitutes leftist praxis in a era of commodified dissent and abundant avenues for productive-seeming activity. Did literally no one finish this piece?!
This article is about what constitutes leftist praxis in a era of commodified dissent and abundant avenues for productive-seeming activity. Did literally no one finish this piece?!
I got through maybe a third of this article before I got exhausted. Who has time to delve into the drama of random people on the internet's interpersonal relationships with other random people on the internet? Nothing about this level of social dissection is healthy or productive in any way.
This internet culture war stuff has just gotten so circlejerky with commentators commenting on commentators commenting on commentators. What are we even talking about anymore? Do none of us have hobbies?
It has always been like this, forum/irc drama existed forever. Now it's just even more amplified by microblogging blurbs and follower tribal mentality of 2019.
Youtube drama is a microcosm of its own, think Logan Paul, Pewdiepie and cases like that, people make careers out of it. It's an easy way to generate clickable outrage content out of nothing.
Keemstar, the asshole that he is, has literally made a career out of youtube drama.
Comparing Contrapoints' Opulence to Logan fucking Paul. I have lost the capacity to even.
You should have finished the article then. Because that's not the conclusion it is building towards whatsoever.
I posted this article because I was frustrated with the internet churn of somebody doing a dumb thing and doubling down. That may have made a mistake since it is founded on drama, and hasn't really added a bunch to this conversation, but the idea of LeftTube existing as it's own marketing, rather than the end all be all of left theory is an interesting thesis. It's easier to critique what's out there than to build something yourself, and the internet makes it easier still, so when people get big and highly marketable, it's easy to throw rocks at them or the people attacking them and feel like you have made a better world. Ergo it's marketing.
The article links to Natalie's statement about the matter and she definitely does not double down.
I misspoke.
Whew lad:
Or perhaps because Left Unity is the only way to defeat the monolithic block of the right? Maybe because the right loves to cause Left Disunity by amplifying the kind of infighting this article is about?
Which stuff? More leftist content? Because most of these BreadTubers don't put ads in their content and fund almost entirely off of Patreon. So...what stuff are they selling? And afaik, unless there are ads on the videos, YouTube doesn't make money directly from said content.
Then, he goes into social capital, which, IMO, stumbles directly into a discussion about whether such behavior is a product of capitalism, or if it is some deeper tendency in human behavior to want to follow strong leaders. In capitalism, this is indicated by people with lots of money, but in a society without such mechanisms to hoard wealth, cults of personality and amassing social capital would still occur.
So it seems to come down to: is BreadTube primarily a de-radicalizing tool, or is it a discussion space for leftist discourse? Are those in it immune from criticism simply because it's a de-radicalization tool above all else?
Or can we perhaps come together to realize that as long as our primary discussion spaces are anonymous and centralized, any misstep (and let's be clear here, these are missteps. Nobody is perfect, nobody can be expected to capitulate 100% of the time if they hold a view, and especially not if the primary means of contributing to the discussion is sending death threats to those who don't hold the "right view", and nobody can be expected to have all the right information all the time) can and will be amplified by those who are more interested in causing and continuing chaos than they are actually coming to a concerted point.
And that's part of why this whole discussion kind of misses the point: the only reason we can criticize Natalie so heavily and so readily is because she puts out content that other people view and doesn't simply sit behind an anonymous username and post degrading shit about others. Is there a certain filter that causes certain personality types to get into YouTubing in the first place? Absolutely. Is that primarily driven by Capitalism? Unless we have a solution for preventing people from amassing social capital, which, IMO, is impossible, then we have to realize that this is a bigger issue than "It's Capitalism's Fault". This is brushing up on certain aspects of sociology and human behavior that might be fundamentally at odds with anonymous, large, public, online spaces.
Certain forms of leftism are mutually exclusive. You can't have syndicalism at the same time as you have Stalinism.
As Seder calls it "the self-satisfaction of supporting the Majority Report."
Fundamentally at odds or fundamentally unskilled, unprepared etc?
Por que no los dos? Is there some aspect of one that mutually excludes the other? In theory a "movement" (cringe) predicated on the study and discussion of anarchist socialist theory and praxis is the end point of development toward libertarian, egalitarian modes of thought. In practice there seem to be breadtubers at all stages of this progression with a heavy emphasis on those not directly dealing with "the bread."
In this way, breadtube does reflect a market in that the supply for content is rising to meet demand. There are more socdems, centrist consensus liberals, radicalized shitlords etc. than there are people who have read, been introduced to conquest of bread. So, the supply of videos skews heavily in that direction. Some middle tier tubers like ThoughtSlime, Non-Compete, LibertarianSocialistRants, et al. do traffic in this but not exclusively and as a minority. Socially, monetarily it is more capitally incentive to produce such content because of the algorithm.
This seems like falsely ascribing intent when ignorance is perhaps a more likely explanation. Many people in these outrage mobs are probably newly arrived at their positions and/or are basking in the glow of social approval for saying these things. Part of the value I find in this piece is that it introduces to these people (I hope) a novel concept: that the point is not contra, contra, contra, but to contextualize your outrage in a larger conversation and to talk about that.
This granular, missing the forest for the trees discourse is certainly a much wider practice than the converse. In my mind, I try to think of these outrage mob people in the context of who they used to be and who they might become if so empowered. I doubt these people were screaming and throwing tantrums about non-binary erasure by public personalities as children. It seems credible the claim that a future stage of this progression for many people will be the contextual analysis of cultural, economic, and political episodes - should we choose to normalize the practice.
As someone with no background info or exposure to pretty much any of this, the TL;DR in the article and linked video given as explanation were quite opaque.
In my search to make sense of them, I found this article which I think does a good job of explaining the controversy in detail, for those of us that are out of the loop. It helped me much better understand all the meta-discourse surrounding this.
EDIT: There's still a missing piece for me. The linked article says the following:
The article I found didn't address this at all, and it's been too long since I watched "Opulence" to remember specifically what it's referencing (nor do I have time to sit down for 45 minutes to suss it out). As written, it sounds like Natalie's typical humor, tossing out a clearly self-aggrandizing statement as a sort of reverse self-deprecation, though it's hard to tell since I'm going at this off of a second-hand summary of an implication. That's quite shaky ground. Can anyone shed light on this particular element for me?
I fucking hate internet drama. I wish computers crashed more often, then maybe people would be forced to leave twitter behind for ten minutes and go outside and look at a tree or something.
I'm obviously joking. But seriously - don't people see how harmful in-fighting is when it comes to actually achieving progressive aims in the real world? Cancel culture and woke purity-testing is the People's Front of Judea of the internet age.
In this case, there was no in fighting. Contrapoints platformed someone she shouldn't have because she was ignorant of the criticisms of this person. Then she released a statement saying she had learned and would not have done so again knowing what she knows now.
Ooh! Culture spicy wars content! My favorite!
I'm very glad that this ended up not being a piece about Contra. I think here apology was fine and that a broader conversation about transmedicalism is more productive.
Mo's point about BreadTube being a market for deradicalizing internet reactionaries is a good one and that consuming it passively is not praxis. I've been off the subreddit for a a couple months since I kept getting downvoted for bitching about lack of ideas and an over abundance of Ben Shapiro takedowns. But in the context of this piece I see now that I was missing the part where these creators are targeting centrist consensus liberals and not leftists.
The call to action and to read books at the end was a nice touch but again, as most leftist calls to action these days, lacked substance, vision, and pertinence to any sort of overarching goals for a leftist project. Many talks about system change but the emerging discourse about what that system should be doesn't seem to be happening en masse yet.
This is 100% Culture War byproduct, but kind of an interesting take on the parasocialization of YouTubers, irony of capitalism creep into leftist discourse circles, and why you don't Tweet your heroes.
This article is about what constitutes leftist praxis in a era of commodified dissent and abundant avenues for productive-seeming activity. Did literally no one finish this piece?!