This Is a Joke

             Something that I realize that most internet and social figures don’t realize is that online stuff is really a joke. It’s true that there’s lots of money to be made, lots of social energy to be harvested, lots of status and opportunities that are available to successful internet people, but the stakes to internet ventures are extremely weighted to the upside. The worst that can really happen, if you’re not a moron who hits yourself or destroys yourself because of online stuff, is that you get banned or made fun of online. The nature of online “careerism” is extremely isolated from the real world until you get to the point where it’s so easy to make money from your reputation that the real world consequences don’t really matter for online behavior. There are exceptions to this, of course, with regards to political endeavors that are a hybrid of online and offline life, but this is the exception that proves the rule.

            If you’ve ever been around actually bad people, actually dangerous people – if you’ve ever watched somebody get stabbed or had their face beaten in or some girl get pounded on by her husband or bf while he’s on coke or crack– then you realize just how low the stakes of the internet are. Because the internet is a fairly affluent and new phenomenon, the people who are content creators are generally not from the underclass where failures are actually dangerous or hurtful in a real sense, so people online think of being made fun of or mocked as some horrible outcome when it’s really not.  The “failure mode” of the internet is being a laughingstock to middle class people too obsessed with the internet and internet culture, not anything serious.

            While I am from a good background and have had a good life, not opulent or trustfund kid tier but actually good, I have had a decent amount of experience with more seedy people and seedy situations, so internet stuff has been shown for what it is, which is a joke. Unlike the pseudo-intellectuals trying to do what I do with ease, I know what actually bad consequences are, what it means to be in a life or death situation, so I know internet stuff is the future. You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars with relative ease, just like with selling or transporting drugs, without having to be around drug addicts or getting in trouble with the law. You don’t have to worry about being robbed, you don’t have to worry about being arrested, and you don’t have to worry about getting killed.

            As stated prior, the internet is currently a middle class phenomenon. Most successful content creators are pretty coddled and naïve people, because these are the people who got access to technology and social networks and had the time to invest energy into them and are now raking in the cash. This won’t always be the case, because these people are mentally weak and easily beaten by people who are willing to be cruel and mean and aggressive because they’ve dealt with real cruelty and meanness and aggressiveness in the real world.

            We are still in the infancy of the internet, where people can get by and win and develop reputations by sucking off other mediocrities and basically approaching their “media strategy” as people on the West Coast traditionally approach “media strategy”. The reason the West Coast fake niceness and hug circles are normalized on the internet is that is how traditional media worked, because the traditional media was controlled by chokepoints of nepotistic figures controlling production and distribution of media. You had to be nice to people, you had to suck off people “higher up” in media circles, because those people were friends with producers and editors and publishers. That isn’t the case now, which is why I’ve been so successful in my endeavors, but most people don’t realize this means you can afford to treat internet circles and “respected” people like trash. These people are not people you need to woo, these people are people you degrade and trash and humiliate and take from. They no longer control access to publishing or distribution.

            I am the start of the first wave of people like me, people who are antisocial and not particularly interested in big tent acceptance or respect. Being antisocial is not the only thing that is required to win long term on the internet -- you also have to have something worth saying. Empty platitudes and talk about peace and love and unity, which is what most current content creators do, will be increasingly shown to be hollow and foolish. The pretty lies that the middle class content creators were raised with and implicitly believe will be stripped bare and revealed to be lies, they will be trashed by people like me for fun and profit. I’ve been extremely rude and crass to people who have institutional support on the internet, and this is not just because I don’t respect them, but because I know I don’t need them and can use them as a punching bag to elevate myself. While I am one of the first people doing this, I’m not all that special outside of being one of the first people to do this. My strategy, which is not really my strategy at all and just me acting in line with actual incentives and system structures, will be shown to be correct and effective and will be adopted by many people like me, in all sorts of creative fields. Again, the internet is a joke, you can attack people and be rude to people and disrespectful to the current “ruling class” and get away with it in ways you couldn’t prior to the decentralization of information distribution.

            None of what any of us post is going to change history or save or damn the world. No podcast, no blogpost, no interview is going to alter destiny or fate on a grand scale. The sooner you internalize this, the sooner you can express yourself without fear of messing up or pissing off the “wrong” person. This isn’t to say to be antagonistic for no reason or pick fights for no reason, but that the stakes to everything you’re doing are extremely low. Apply derision and attack people in a way that can benefit you, and don’t really worry about being “locked out” of influence or wealth. The breaks are off the train, eventually everybody will realize what I’m writing in this essay, and the quicker you realize this the more of an advantage you will have over the latecomers.