Drama equals views equals money
July 3, 2018 9:47 PM   Subscribe

If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience....There was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. Things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix, on his way to a video-game convention, and several of the airport’s runways had to be closed. Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer
posted by meowzilla (29 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I caught up with some of this during the whole Ice and Asian Andy almost getting the shit beaten out of their crew being racist fucks at a Denny's. It's hard to escape from his madness even though I don't sub to him or any of his dipshit crew because it pops up on so many corners of the internet.

I have absolutely zero sympathy for him. He can go die in a ditch as far as I'm concerned.

Then there's the whole "pay $2.95 for 14 year olds to laugh at racist shit" aspect of it that basically makes an industry of human garbage. Hell, Jammal Hassan Harraz a.k.a "Arab Andy" has been in jail since the end of May because his TTS speaker broadcasted a bomb threat causing mass panic at a university.

IRL was a mistake. Nuke the whole fucking thing from orbit IMO. Also, shout out to Gawker and their alumni being useful in the industry. /s
posted by Definitely Not Sean Spicer at 10:07 PM on July 3, 2018 [6 favorites]


I had never heard of this dude, and approached him with an open mind, which got filled up quick. Chen drops a huge turd in the punch bowl of his characterization of Denino three-quarters of the way through, but it is Denino’s turd. My sympathies turned over like a spilled beer.

I still don’t think he deserves to be swatted at all, let alone every day. (My God, we have got to reform police response.) If she doesn’t already, Caroline will probably someday feel that she has dodged a bullet, and with the guys in his fan base, that could have been literally true. It’s hard to see how he could change his life without changing his name and spending a couple years in a mountainous region with poor internet service. As I’ve said before, there should be a monastery for crap dudes who would sincerely like to try being human, and it should have no internet whatsoever.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:11 PM on July 3, 2018 [17 favorites]


Truman was blessed* because he was being live-streamed but didn't know it. Those doing it consciously have... things to keep in mind (to say the least).

*The entirely of The Truman Show is pretty horrific even while it's a terrific allegory. So does that mean that the reality of the allegory is horrific? I'm going to need some time in my quiet place.
posted by hippybear at 10:16 PM on July 3, 2018


Yeah this guy sucks hard- but notice the bit in the article where Chen talks about how this dude was on meds until he was 16 and he refused to take them and now he talks about how "drugs are a mental prison?" This is someone who is an asshole but man, what if he hadn't stopped taking his meds? Or gotten better therapy? This guy strikes me as someone who desperately needed to be medicated and was until he wasn't and now we all have to pay the consequences.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:52 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ehhhh, I was medicated until I wasn't, and I also decided to stop when I was 16. We can't really know what his experience of being medicated was like, or what the effect was. I'd be a little uncomfortable overemphasizing mental health in accounting for his behavior.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:08 PM on July 3, 2018 [15 favorites]


Ehhhh, I was medicated until I wasn't, and I also decided to stop when I was 16. We can't really know what his experience of being medicated was like, or what the effect was. I'd be a little uncomfortable overemphasizing mental health in accounting for his behavior.

Yeah, me too. There’s nothing in his behavior that screams mental health issues, unless and until the DSM lists "being an asshole" as a diagnosis.

I’m sure he would benefit a lot from therapy with or without medications — panic attacks are no fun and you can do a lot to manage them — but the way he’s chosen to interact with other people is just regular old obnoxiousness.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:23 PM on July 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


I am speaking as someone who currently takes meds for PTSD and will prob get off them soon but who now with time and therapy can do so. If I had gotten off the admittedly bad med merry-go-round earlier I shudder to think how awful I would have been lashing out in pain. I did some of that, but good mental health support put me on a better track. I’m usually the last one to bring up mental health in these situation- sometimes and asshole is just an asshole- but it’s in the article, and I think it’s really sad. He might have been different and then all the people he’s been hurting wouldn’t be hurt.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:00 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Aye this guy is garbage, but who are these people watching the stream? I feel like I would have to somehow add several layers of willful self-hate to my psyche, maybe some alcoholism and a crystal meth addiction, before I could watch this for hours everyday. It makes my I-shouldn't-watch-two-world-cup-matches-a-day guilt seem well adjusted.
posted by Brocktoon at 1:33 AM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


Truman was blessed* because he was being live-streamed but didn't know it. Those doing it consciously have... things to keep in mind (to say the least).

*The entirely of The Truman Show is pretty horrific even while it's a terrific allegory. So does that mean that the reality of the allegory is horrific? I'm going to need some time in my quiet place.


Live-streamers resemble the logic of the neoliberal subject turned outwards: commodify and exploit. Maybe they are so disquieting to some of us because we catch a reflection of ourselves in them...
posted by 3zra at 1:59 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


He's at the cutting edge of... something, I guess.
posted by um at 2:16 AM on July 4, 2018


I feel as though focusing on one person is almost missing the broader cultural context here which deserves some examination:

Consider the following

Since then, its members have become fixated on the idea that the entire stream is fake; now, at the end of each broadcast, the subreddit fills with posts calling the action “scripted.”

But, of course, the store is already to some degree scripted, as its creator describes coming up with ideas for "content" in the article.

This reality-tv desire to have both "real life" and over the top drama protrsyed at the same time seems a bigger phenomenon to me than just IRL streaming. You can see it in highly regarded blogs about "making Paleo easy" that feature arrangements if for and photographs that clearly took hours to set up, accompanied by text that implies the author is just an everyday person who eats every meal just like this. You can see it in the replacement of anything resembling documentary coverage on television with reality shows that claim to merely follow people in their lives, but have way too obviously scripted plot arcs and themes in dislogue.

This inability or unwillingness to separate fiction from reality in our current culture seems like a source of a great deal of the drama described in this article, and not a standard of which we ought to be proud.
posted by thegears at 3:37 AM on July 4, 2018 [12 favorites]


Yeah, there seem to be generations now that are unable/unwilling to distinguish “real life” from mimesis. I can’t help thinking that our almost total neglect of the humanities has something to do with that.
posted by octobersurprise at 4:26 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


You can see it in the replacement of anything resembling documentary coverage on television with reality shows

We're living in a golden age of documentary production and it's all over the place on television and streaming services and if all you're seeing is reality television then it's your problem not a problem of what is offered and available.
posted by hippybear at 4:41 AM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


hippybear, let me clarify. I'm not saying there aren't excellent documentaries available. I'm referring to what is actually being watched by a majority of people today and what is considered the norm.
posted by thegears at 4:44 AM on July 4, 2018


Or perhaps you're referring to what is being discussed in media today as far as television is concerned, and that is not at all reflective of what is actually being watched. I've had the other men who work with me in the warehouse surprise me with saying they had watched Documentary A or Documentary Series B and wanted to discuss it (even Documentary Podcast C!), but rarely hear them talk about reality television. They're more obsessed with the minutia of the MCU.

Of course, anecdotes are not data.
posted by hippybear at 4:50 AM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


The issue isn't that people "can't actually distinguish", any more than that people don't know that pro wrestling is fake. It's that they are cool with the pervasive performance of the self for an audience. It's like, people know reality TV is "fake", what they're judging isn't "oh, this character said X, that means she's really Y", it's what they think of the morality of the values expressed in the performance, because performance is all there is of the self. It's like a nightmare version of non-alienated labor where you're just laboring all the time, but you're laboring at being a human.

Basically with streaming and reality TV the only self that exists is the working/performing self - the whole person has been subsumed into being a worker. It's opposite-world marxism, where instead of seizing the means of production to free the workers to fully express their humanity, we've redesigned humanity so that its value is entirely captured by capital.

I have to say, I find the "always on" aspect of contemporary life probably the worst. You can, so to speak, shoot a man on 5th avenue as long as you make sure to do it live so that everyone can watch, comment, meme and tweet.
posted by Frowner at 4:52 AM on July 4, 2018 [29 favorites]


I have to say, I find the "always on" aspect of contemporary life probably the worst.

I don't want to start a derail with this comment. But as a gay man of 50 years old, I have spent decades with a rather conscious meditation on the performative aspect of daily existence. And I'm fairly sure that there are a zillion people going through life who have not spent any time at all reflecting on how they present to others.

And hoo-boy! That they've never been able to step outside themselves and contemplate the way they dress, groom, interact.. is pretty self-evident. Either that or they're being deliberately defiant, but interacting with them leads me more to believe that they don't have a performative aspect to their existence, they just don't give a fuck.

I find the "always on" sort of person equally exhausting. Like, just relax and be a person and put the fucking phone down for, let's say, an hour, and we'll go from there.
posted by hippybear at 5:06 AM on July 4, 2018 [7 favorites]


Stuff like this sends me into full-on, cane-waggling, fuck-kids-today mode. It just makes me irrationally angry that large numbers of people are into something this dumb, and that people are being rewarded with millions of dollars for being stunty douchebags.

The psychological impulse that brought us celebrity gossip, reality TV, and ow-my-balls entertainment has always been there. The democratizing power of the internet has just allowed it to flow to its natural position of rest, at the bottom of the barrel.

Fuck I'm old. Sigh.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:33 AM on July 4, 2018 [16 favorites]


It’s the platforms.
It’s the platforms.
It’s the platforms.

If we manage to avoid a Nazi dystopian hellscape future, there will be a reckoning for YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and the rest.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:57 AM on July 4, 2018 [14 favorites]


While I understand perhaps the role in platforms in policing their content, it's actually the users of the platforms who are generating that content, in every case you've mentioned and all the rest.
posted by hippybear at 6:50 AM on July 4, 2018


There wouldn't be nearly this much of an incentive to generate this sort of content if the platforms' monetization schemes did not reward a race to the bottom.
posted by Phire at 7:20 AM on July 4, 2018 [9 favorites]


If I had gotten off the admittedly bad med merry-go-round earlier I shudder to think how awful I would have been lashing out in pain. I did some of that, but good mental health support put me on a better track.

Ah, yeah, I see what you mean.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:11 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was just reading articles about the performativity of Instagram, as I've been stuck at home for more than a month now and I feel like I'm exhausting my Instagram stream faster than the 2,200 people I follow can replenish it with stuff I actually want to see some days. After a while it's all people trying to sell me stuff, people posting bad vacation photos, and increasingly nonsensical stuff like ASMR vids. And I also feel the frustration when I post and don't get the response I want from people who probably don't even know I care (or worse, who do), which makes me think I should care a lot less about who likes what I post on Instagram. It's hard when that's a lot of what you have going on your life at a given time.

And so this was an interesting read in my current situation and mindset. Of course, the fact that this livestreaming culture pulls in and radicalizes kids is parallel to other things that happen on Reddit. But then I have sympathy for people like the guy with cancer who also can't do much and so watches crap like this to maintain interest in life and be part of a community. I've watched the occasional gaming livestream before, and it is a bit mesmerizing and amazing how quickly you start to feel like you know these people, even though you truly don't know them at all.

Human brains really want to connect, and if all you give them is these twisted ways of forming a connection, they'll take it and run with it and build up an entire edifice devoted to it. We have these ant minds that always have to be creating structures of friendships and connections, even if what we make in cases like this only superficially resembles real friendships. (Not to sound like parents who suggest that online friendships aren't real friendships, because I don't think that at all, but rather that friendships mediated by the lens of a subreddit and shared livestream fandom might not be the deep true thing that online friendship can be.)

I'm also a bit suspicious of the accuracy of any interview attempt like this. It's The New Yorker, so no doubt it has been meticulously edited and fact-checked, so that's not the issue. What I know, though, as a writer and editor, is that it's so easy to tell a story like this, with all-real facts, and not even get at the smallest portion of the reality of the situation, to humanize someone not worth knowing. This is a snapshot of this guy's life, and very likely one that has been shaped by the subject's own focus on narrative and self-presentation.

I realized this at some point about a former writer colleague of mine, that no matter who she wrote about, I was suddenly interested in and could find myself sympathetic to them. Then I met some of the people she wrote about and found them to have very few redeeming human qualities. She wrote them in a way that made them interesting, but it was like a glamour, a special effect. I used to think that was a gift, but now I think it's perhaps more of a curse. I don't want to know this livestreamer or anyone like him; in reality, I think he falls into the category of "people I never want to meet in real life," because woe betide anyone who interacts with him in front of his small army of viewers.

I'm rooting for Caroline and any real friends in this guy's life. She actually seems to be a real human he can connect with, at least from this account, maybe because she's embroiled in the same streaming culture of utter superficiality he is. I would be very curious to know how this guy's life turns out, 5 years from now even. His is a very dystopian way to live.
posted by limeonaire at 9:17 AM on July 4, 2018 [10 favorites]


If we manage to avoid a Nazi dystopian hellscape future, there will be a reckoning for YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and the rest.

Speaking as one of the thousands of people who got behind the fledgling internet and pushed I often wonder if we did the right thing.

At the time my eyes were full of Project Gutenberg, and driving maps, and tiny boutique websites. I knew we were carrying the BBS culture via Usenet but I never thought it would scale to be an actual public hazard. I figured that trolls were by nature solitary creatures, and I certainly never imagined them jockeying for position in their own tribes.

In addition I've also seen a large number of sites with quality material (including this one) get so wrapped up in managing comment sections that they lose track of the qualities that attracted so many users in the first place. Not that sites mustn't grow and move on, but that the changes tend to be driven vociferous commenters instead of input from outside the community.

Basically, as much as I enjoy the discussion here and elsewhere there is a significant price to pay whenever you add interactivity to the internet. I often wonder if everyone would be better off if we went back to the days when it was mostly one-way communication.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:10 AM on July 4, 2018 [6 favorites]


Reading that made me shudder in aversion. The thought of one of these...people...moving into your apartment complex or suburb. You'd have no idea that the global id had been focused on your home, and no way to turn it off.

I've been on the Internet a long time, and there are moments that make me feel old. This is one of the moments that make me feel "Whoops. Wrong planet."

As always, William Gibson is depressingly prescient:
"[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.” --Idoru
posted by bitmage at 1:31 PM on July 4, 2018 [7 favorites]


"You're spending too much time with your girlfriend, break up with her," reads to me as abuser tactics.

"Voted for Trump because it was funny" and "doesn't use the N-word with a hard R" helps give a picture of how he ended up cultivating such a toxic audience, but still.
posted by RobotHero at 3:49 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Tangentially, I think this AskMefi question: Internet fame for kids is relevant to the broader discussion of how much performance is getting baked early for kids.

There is intense pressure to have communication mediated by technology in our society. The most common, right now, is social media. The reason why Facebook is not going away any time soon is that it is the emotional and social labor tool for a chunk of the population. I promise not to derail on gender and technology adoption. What I am trying to say is that technology enables and monetizes performance, genuine or not, of our intimate selves, including the id in its messed up glory. Ice Poseiden is a symptom of that combination of performance, visual validation and a voracious audience appetite for intimacy even if it is train wreck style. Maybe trainwreck seems the most genuine instead of the very tailored perfect fantasies of Instagram, which is why we can't glance away. It is, however, watching a train wreck where you hate all the passengers.
posted by jadepearl at 4:14 PM on July 4, 2018


I say it's the platforms. Things weren't nearly this insane when we didn't have social media and people just had to have discussions on message boards and in comment sections of individual blogs. Now that literally every human on earth can see something immediately, everyone goes crazy. Apparently.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:31 AM on July 5, 2018


It's more the whole "sharing" concept coupled with algorithms created to drive more clicks because advertising pays for everything, and then a whole lot more.

When you had to seek out the places to interact and what specifically you were interacting about, you found things because you wanted to. Having things thrown at you which push your buttons in various ways is much more aggro.
posted by hippybear at 8:22 PM on July 6, 2018 [2 favorites]


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