Entry 5

Okay so... just today I read a pretty juicy article that's both alarming and also depressing to say the least. It was written beautifully, tragically, ruefully. The humor that highlights the absolute absurdity that is an influencer's life in a content house is both a balm that soothes you as you go down this crazy rabbit hole, and also a cutting criticism of this kind of lifestyle.

Podcast of the author talking about this piece further just for supplemental content is here

It's... a doozy of an article and I'm probably like not that qualified to even put my 2 cents in especially since I found this article on Tumblr and lord knows ppl comment and put their 2 cents in all the time on that site but yknow... influencers and the grip that late stage capitalism has on the web nowadays has been a weird fascination for me for like a while. Esp since I have friends who for some reason are (were? idk) just like enthralled by that stuff. I don't think they actually have that much of an interest on those kind of content house youtube channels now (probs due to the part of drama channels who expose these channels for the obvious fake money grabbing schemes that they are, thus bringing down their reputation. It's kind of like an ecosystem in that way) but it was still bewildering to me how they would keep up with the antics of teen boys all the time in the 1st place??

Even as a young person-- and honestly what even am I, Gen Z? Millenial? That shit is all bs anyways-- I didn't get it. I still don't. You're going to read the article through the lens of a bewildered millenial English professor encountering and living with these teens for the 1st time but you're also going to be reading from my perspective as well bc honestly... idk how but I managed to dodge like about 80% of the schemes that the internet has tried to pull these past few years.

I'm... impressed that even due to my young age and by all accounts being a perfect target for these data harvesting sites pushing all kinds of scams and schemes that I've managed to avoid it all? Being a room-dwelling tumblrina in my teens might explain that but honestly I've seen plenty of ppl on Tumblr just up and fuck off from the site (esp after the 2018 porn ban) and get themselves tangled up in the inevitable web of the internet influencing life, whether they've actually found a platform on another site or they've "died trying". Twitch, TikTok and Youtube reign supreme it seems, and ppl who weren't "marketable" enough for those sites eventually wound up on Twitter anyways. It's all part of the plan I guess.

But honestly what am I even talking about? Yeah I'm not setting up ring light cameras and streaming on Twitch desperately trying to get faceless internet denizens to give me the validation I want but I did actually fall into a miserable spell last year particularly after my gallbladder surgery. I had a job I hated in the beginning of 2021 that had me sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day with nothing but the company headset, my computer and my phone. It was miserable and I found solace in AO3 fanfics and Twitter. Then I was bed-ridden for 2 weeks after my surgery and the soc media usage just took off from there. Definitely didn't help that I was also in a miserable job after that one, working in a fast food joint. Yeah, 2021 was absolutely not my year. And for the astrology hoes out there... it was my 12th House profection year so I mean ahahaha

So yeah I'm not 100% an angel either but tbh... hopping on Neocities and denouncing large portions of time spent on social media is literally the best decision I have made in a WHILE. My god, my dark clouds cleared up almost overnight and my mental health has vastly improved since I swore off of Twitter. That place is... truly a cesspool.

Not only that, but this article is basically like the universe swooping down and validating me by saying "here you go Mars, this is your present for staying off of social media for so long!" and like a winged angel, this article floated down from the universe and landed in my lap, reassuring me in its own weirdly silent but tangible way that yeah... I'm right. This lifestyle is simply not sustainable at all for anyone. Period.

There's honestly not much for me to say except this:

Setting aside the obvious "teens nowadays are on their phones all the time!!1!!" criticisms... bc that's just low-hanging fruit but also just not the root of the problem whatsoever. Listen. Why are teens on their phones all the time? Like actually. Why is this society seeing lower and lower attention spans, what's up with the permeating odor of anti-intellectualism going on in the crevices of our everyday lives? I actually saw a news report on some incident that happened I think in Idaho or Ohio where grown adults (conservatives... who else) were increasingly becoming hostile to information and best of all: books. Books in a library. They harassed their town library demanding librarians pull numerous books off of the shelves in a weird town-mob-pitchfork-waving way. They wanted the library to pull down a list of more than 400 books. The punchline? The library didn't even have any of the books they demanded to be taken away. Apparently, not even 1.

Here's the article from NBC News actually and wow the actual story is wilder than I remembered!

These idiot conservatives wanted to book-burn so bad and in their mob-like brainwashed state couldn't even be bothered to look up their library's own catalog to check if the books they wanted gone were even there in the 1st place. What a joke! A concerning and nail-biting joke but a joke nonetheless.

The point I'm trying to make is that the spread of misinfo and brainwashing isn't excluded to only teeny boppers and kids. Adults well into their retirement age spread baseless memes and QAnon conspiracies. Adults are the ones who set up scams and promote their snake oil products on TikTok under the guise of being a "sustainable small business". Adults are the ones recording these teens dancing in the middle of lavish living rooms and egging them on to do whatever it takes to get 1 million views, 2 million views, 10 million views. The entire machine of capitalism is after all a product of hundreds of years of adults perpetuating patriarchal and imperialist culture for their own benefit (white ppl mostly, you get the idea, but POC also have the power to perform the isms too you get me?). The kids? They have nothing to do with this. The reason why toddlers get handed iPads before they even learn how to talk and thus subsequently get their entire brain functions rewritten by algorithms is because mommy and daddy have no time and energy to even raise them after working 12 hour shifts just to avoid homelessness.

It's all a trickle-down effect of the crushing demands of these billionaires sitting at the top getting fat off of their own hedonistic lives due to their mind-boggling wealth. But also the effects of these billionaires pushing and pushing for their 30th apartment complex, their 5th mega-mansion, their 8th yacht, their 12th Lamborghini or whatever the fuck... is simply bc that's what capitalism demands. The great maw of the beast of capital is never satiated. Lmao read that last sentence in a great booming voice, it's so dramatic :P

But it's also so fucking true! Literally why any of this is happening, why we're in an age of anti-intellectualism in the middle of The Age of Information, why toddlers are getting their synapses rewired by YouTube, why 18 or 19 year olds are dropping out of college to pursue this evasive "fame" online is the exact same reason why we have this never-ending homelessness problem, why so many ppl in the US have to go without food in lieu of rent, and why landlords even exist. CAPITALISM. That's... that's it. It's created such a domino effect of why literally everything that's wrong with society exists today, and it's fucked over everyone so thoroughly that you can trace pretty much anything you hate about the world back to that one simple word: Capitalism. Profit. Economy. Stocks. Cash. Money. Property. CAPITAL.

You literally cannot escape no matter where you turn and it's so much more evident now that we're in the throes of it. Late-stage capitalism. It's a term that everyone seems to be aware of and has dropped at least once online but what is it actually? I'll tell you.

It's this article outlining how millionaires are "investing" in content houses for teenagers and young adults. It's the price tag on that one meal you need to get through your 12 hour shift. It's the rent price rising every year (or every month if you're unlucky), it's hostile architecture on benches and sidewalks to prevent homeless ppl from resting. It's the paywall that prevents you from reading an article or essay, it's the "please create login account" popup once you scroll down too far on a website. It's the laws changing and getting blocked due to money exchanging hands that make life all that more miserable for the working class. It's the union-busting practices your workplace employs and it's the ads you see everywhere, in between tweets, before and after a YouTube video, walking down the sidewalk, catching the bus, listening to a radio station or simply flipping through a magazine.

And now that every sure thing has a price tag? Now late-stage capitalism is turning its hungry beady eyes towards us, humans. It's not enough that we labor constantly for this unattainable unachievable ideal of the "American Dream", now the dream has shifted to going to the fucking moon. Living on Mars! It's so obvious to me that the goal posts will always be moved, that even when ppl do happen to strike it rich and live out a life so many ppl only dream about that it's just not enough! It will never be enough.

We are now sticking price tags on our individual relationships, our interactions, rating other ppl and tying ppl's livelihoods to those ratings (like the article mentions basically "the Yelpification of academia" and it's true). We're selling ourselves with every click, every ad watched, every page visited. We're forced by Instagram and other soc media sites to create profiles, neat little pages of data that the algorithms can easily reach into to sell our data to their 3rd party advertising companies. Then we wonder why all these teens and 20-somethings are drowning under the vast ocean of disconnection and loneliness.

God, the loneliness! We've scrambled for so long to attain wealth. Capital. Money, basically the one thing in this prison of a society that we create and perpetuate day by day that is also used to survive in this same world. So much so that it's bleeding into every little crack and crevice of our lives. Everyone wonders why they're so repressed, disconnected, anxious, depressed, out of the loop. This is not a sustainable society!

I want to SCREAM!! This is not sustainable!!

Luckily I know I'm not the only one. I think I was following the right ppl on Twitter bc every now and then between the doomscrolling I would find a tweet stuck in the middle as a cry for help by these individuals who made them, like a far-off yelp in the middle of a storm that will eventually be swept away anyways. But I heard it. Cries that sound like "we shouldn't be living like this" and "this is unnatural, can't ppl see that this isn't the way humans should live?" and "this life and society is simply not sustainable, we're killing ourselves for nothing"

And honestly... yeah. We are. I hate to say it but we are in the middle of a drowning sinking ship atm. We are. It's obvious that with the frantic mob-like conservatives living with hate and anxiety everyday and the homelessness epidemic and the shrinking attention spans of kids who put "fame" first before any kind of appropriate education that we are slowly but surely crumbling. Every facet of our society is being gobbled and swallowed up by this beast, Capitalism. It's insatiable. It'll never ever be satisified and the end to capitalism in general is to either revoke it completely or destroy ourselves in the process of "appeasing" it. When you base an entire economy that then bleeds into governments and laws on the abstract concept of "wealth" (and just greed in general) it's kind of like a prophecy doomed to self-cannibalising. We are doomed :)

And tbh I think the thing that struck me the most in this entire article was the occasional mentions of the California wildfires burning and blazing in the background of these influencer events. I didn't really care much for the descriptions of the actual TikTokers themselves, as funny as they happened to be. I was just struck as the writer described all of these teens and 20-somethings gallavanting about in their million dollar mansions and swanky expensive restaurants while the world literally burned around them. They were surrounded by statues of Greek gods and the Muses, perfectly manicured lawns and spacious glass ceilings but beyond the glitz and glamor of being recruited by millionaires to make an absurd amount of content for the internet was the steady smoldering rage of Mother Earth herself. And these kids paid no attention to it as they scrolled through TikTok believing in QAnon conspiracy videos that they happened to scroll to (and honestly knowing what I know about the algorithms of these apps that might not even have been 100%a coincidence...) as they lazed around playing video games and shooting basket balls on a court.

The image couldn't have been painted more perfectly. The writer literally asked one of the TikTokers if they had any political opinions on the current state of the world today, particularly about the future of this country (which we all know is doomed to fall right? Right?) and the indolent influencers really had the nerve to say "what? Nah. Things are getting better every year."

I think at that point I actually put my phone down because I literally... like wow. It floored me.

But that's what a self-cannibalising society needs. Disconnect. Distraction. A lack of community and communication. It's better and easier to eat up whole swathes of ppl when they're docile, distracted, delusional and placated. That's why we have this loneliness epidemic, why strength in numbers is so viciously quashed by this police force we keep pouring millions of dollars into (not willingly might I add), why we have so many distractions in media constantly feeding our over-bloated minds with the hollow and empty promises of expressing ourselves, but never enacting any meaningful change that betters our lives in the end.

Late stage Capitalism has even broken through and spilled into basic counter-culture and protests, commodifying even the voices and ideas of activists. BLM, gay rights and pride, feminist marches. Nothing is untouched in this world, we've reached the final stage of a greedy beast-like society that easts up everything in its way. No stone left unturned. This is what I feel like living in tyranny is like except we don't even have one face to blame for all of this any more like civilizations used to before. I fear that we kinda evolved into our own worse enemy, and not just bc of the wars.

I still have hope despite all of this tbh. I know I get into depressing topics all too often but... a man-made concept can always be undone by man, right? Like Ursula K Le Guin has already said before, we can undo this mess. But I know in my heart that... it's not going to be feasible without a death toll. Unfortunately. And I really feae that humans have gone a bit too far this time, bc unlike the fall of Rome, this empire's collapse just might take a siazble chunk of the planet along with it.

To close out this blog post (that is just super long holy jesus thx 4 reading this if you got this far) I'll leave y'all with the last sentences of the article that nearly took my breath away.

"TikTok is a sign of the future, which already feels like a thing of the past. It is the clock counting down our fifteen seconds of fame, the sound the world makes as time is running out."

If time runs out for us I hope my stupid little website survives somehow, and maybe one day I get to indulge in the human satisfaction that my words will reach another soul far into the future. I hope that future generations of humans understand that they're no more different than the ancestors of our past, they're not alone, and I hope that if humanity does keep surviving for centuries after that they're living much more intuitive, healthy lives than we are. I hope no one has to worry about money ever, or property or education. I only hope and wish for a better future for everyone after I die.