"Did you approve that awful ad, Fry?
Yes I did Leels. And I'll tell you why. Because it - grows - the brand."
Futurama S04E09
With Re-Habilis finished (you can't un-read it) I took the opportunity to explore a possible switch to Substack. Having started this blog thirteen years ago thinking it'd run a couple of months, I chose my venue largely for ease of access and Blogger offered the most streamlined (and, importantly, free) path to writing, hosting and being seen by search engines. My recalcitrant nature has always bristled at being on a Google service, and its increased (if subtle) censorship in recent years has had me wistfully wishing I'd opted for Wordpress (hosted or not) instead, not that there aren't problems there too.
Substack sounded like a possible alternative, but as soon as I tried to set up my basic layout I was struck by a blatant skew in priorities. When a site purportedly centered on writing or other content creation bombards you with dozens of options for monetization, referrals, social media tie-ins, joining this-or-that community, subscriptions, newsletters, automatically spamming your readers' e-mails with everything you put out, "joining the crew"(?) categorization to fit you into various interest niches, a mandatory tab in which you recommend other substacks, and generally making a nuisance of yourself for attention... but not a single interface button to change the font size and a forced phone screen layout... we're obviously not talking about writing. Not to mention the spam I've been getting from them pushing me to spam others whenever I put something up, alternating with Growth Tip: Growth Tip: Growth Tip! Surprised my inbox isn't filtering these guys out as penis enlargement spam. That and their usage statistics give even less demographic info for casual views than Blogger's, focusing instead on subscribers, especially paying ones.
On a completely unrelated topic, I got curious recently about a youtuber I hadn't worried about in many years (because I don't subscribe to his newsletter - see how that works?) called Sargon of Akkad. For a brief time when he launched in 2014, Sargon made a few incisive comments on the feminist insanity being screamed on- and offline, but he soon found it more profitable to push right-wing reactionary propaganda wholesale and eventually ran for office in Britain under the UKIP party (you remember, the Brexit retards?) and supposedly got comically trounced at the polls. Turns out the abrasive "shock jock" image he'd cultivated online didn't transfer well toward wheedling the trust of suburban moms. Don't bother weeping for him though. Due possibly to possessing that quality so critical to YouTube fame, a British accent, he's doing quite alright for himself still sitting pretty on 900k subscribers.
I did wonder what those million viewers were watching, given how sparse his channel looked with a bare handful of videos, all of them recent, as he'd been quite prolific back in the day. It turns out he's been quietly erasing records of his actual personality, to the point even the Internet Archive's captures of his channel don't go further back than 2022 (though a user did put up a full list, which I'll link here once they recover from their recent DDOS attack.) His current crop of self-promotion (aside from peddling a 'zine full of supposedly sage personal wellness advice like subverting your life to others' whims) has just moved predictably further toward classic right-wing rhetoric. (It goes without saying he supports both Trump and that charlatan Musk.) Some videos sound like rip-offs of Miriam Godwinson's "we must dissent" speeches from Alpha Centauri, with titles like "The Future is Now" (hint: in a bad way) or "Dark Days Ahead" or "The Terminus of Civilization" generally decrying technocracy and personal independence or pushing family life, but I found more informative his "We Are Already in the Dystopia" rant. He uses the past generation's change in decor for McDonald's* (looking less like a clown exploded and more like a generic eatery) as one example indicating our society is no longer focused on children and families and blames childlessness for any doom and gloom we might be experiencing.
Because of course it couldn't be that individuals get depressed at being treated like nothing but assembly lines for the next generation of hopeless wage slaves and cannon fodder whose every effort will only feed the pockets of do-nothing investors unto eternity, and who will be sacrificed on the powermongering whim of corporate robber barons.
One of his quirks back in the day used to be occasionally describing himself as atheist, which you might rightly see as incongruous with the usual neoliberal economics / neoconservative social policy angle, and likely a major reason why he's been rebranding himself. After all, where you find kinder/kuche promoted together as moral superiority, the kirche can't be far behind, and sure enough though I'm not seeing an overt bible-thumping vid... yet (he's probably waiting for more of his audience to age and turn to superstition for fear of death) he has already been peppering his phrasing with those all-time favorite non-terms like "spiritual" or "meaning in life" to prime the pump.
How silly of me to think the internet's freedom of expression is about speaking honestly and being heard freely, when clearly the point is to fabricate a persona, start a cult, cornering a market niche you can make emotionally dependent on your weekly validation and wringing cash out of them.
Growth tip: buy my zine!
________________________________________________
* I'm also guessing McDonald's might've moved farther from child appeal not due to customer preferences or any social agenda but because those playplaces have always been lawsuit magnets
P.S.: Now that he's laundered his public record, don't be surprised if Sargon runs for office again after five or ten years of cementing his image as a family values candidate.
No comments:
Post a Comment