151–160 of 410 posts
Interesting experience to read an essay of such insight regarding a subject that is the opposite of insight. Best thing I’ve read this week. I am happy to say I have never seen a Mr. Beast video, and now I will be sure never to see one in the future.
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Left leaning folks are swept up in rage machines too. Leaf through the BoingBoing BBS sometime to get a sense for it.
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As an exercise, try coming up with some metric to measure it. Could be inflammatory posts, or the comment count on inflammatory posts. Compare BB BBS with some rough equivalent right-leaning place. You'll find it's worse in the right-leaning forum, no doubt.
But the phenomena exists on both sides of the political spectrum.
Many trends among one side of the political spectrum are mirrored to a lesser extent on the other side as well, and that's interesting don't you think?
> in cybernetic terms, a long lag time in production is deadly. Does "long lag time" or "deadly" mean something else in cybernetic terms than in regular terms? I found the "in cybernetics terms" insert quite puzzling.
>Dead time is the delay from when a controller output (CO) signal is issued until when the measured process variable (PV) first begins to respond.
https://controlguru.com/dead-time-is-the-how-much-delay-vari...
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10? We’ve been getting steadily more polarized since at least the 80s.
So basically since when cable TV came into mainstream existence.
- Fairness Doctrine killed in the 80s, resulting rise of partisan AM radio and, somewhat later, Fox News.
- Media ownership concentration rules neutered in early ‘00s (iirc). More centralization, again in the hands of big capital.
- None of those rules ever applied to the Web, so when its power as a propaganda and agitation tool skyrocketed with increased use by normal folks (rise of Facebook; usable smartphones with the iPhone) that immediately headed bad directions.
Now we have LLMs, which are at their most-useful by far when you don’t care about accuracy or reputation—so, scams and propaganda getting a big boost in productivity.
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Isn't that the point? By purely focussing on business-centric strategies, the videos no longer have meaning.
This presumes that MrBeast intended to create "videos with meaning" in the first place. In his defense (!?), most of what's churned out by the streaming platforms, hollywood, and the music industry, is also not very bothered by lack of meaning.
That being said I think the author here is taking some things for granted. An example of this to me is "As I wrote in the book, “If creators are speaking their authentic truths, how can they also be accountable to audience feedback? I am personally bemused to see 'authenticity' invoked as a criterion for what is ultimately and obviously a performance". So firstly I don't view authenticity as some binary thing that is mutually exclusive with taking feedback and context. Just because I act differently with my boss, my parents, and my friends based on feedback from them I'm not being inherently inauthentic. To me authenticity and external pressures are at odds but from the few videos and interviews I've seen of Jimmy he seems to genuinely enjoy creating the spectacles he does so beneath all the artifice in the videos I think you're still seeing the core of Jimmy making content that he wants to make. Anyway, I think if you stop looking at stuff like authenticity as less rigid rules for how to act and more as a spectrum or very broad category what the creators say makes more sense (because it's not just Mr Beast saying similar things).
First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36... > “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with politi…
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
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I have no clue how to use YouTube. It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine, the entire home page is exclusively filled with videos relating to that. I can mark videos as "not interesting" but it doesn't do much. I will see exactly the same videos on the home screen, ones that I'm not interested in and don't plan on watching, for weeks or months sometimes. I'm sure there's plenty of interesting co…
I think what you describe is what infecto was saying. You can't use YouTube to find interesting content anymore. You can only use it to find more of what you've already seen. In the past, it was better at unearthing new things. Personally, I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.
It's interesting how this is happening in software engineering YouTube content as well. It seems like things like "go sucks rust is great! Now rust sucks and zig is great!!" get way more views since it is basically clickbait for nerds. It's too bad that nuanced discussion doesn't do too well on social media.
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I wasn't suggesting an equivalence, just that the phenomena of the rage machine exists on both sides. As an exercise, try coming up with some metric to measure it. Could be inflammatory posts, or the comment count on inflammatory posts. Compare BB BBS with some rough equivalent right-leaning place. You'll find it's worse in the right-leaning forum, no doubt. But the phenomena exists on both sides of the political spe…
It’s far more interesting to me how one side of the political spectrum was so totally swallowed by this system, to the extent that literally every single news story is received with outlandish conspiracy theorizing from rather mainstream right wing media.
The null hypothesis is that actually both sides should be equally distorted, but it is very obviously the case they are not. That is what deserves inquiry.