Comment by spectre256 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spectre256 | Hacker News Reader

A key part of the article seems to be that PewDiePie's channel is largely satire, which is inherently under attack and worth protecting. Maybe I am getting old, but I find satire a lot less valuable than I once did.

The article mentions South Park too. I once loved the show, and still remember many moments in a strangely fond way. But the problem of Poe's law and the like means satire is sometimes taken seriously, and the cumulative effects of that have serious and real repercussions.

The creators of South Park, for example, recently "apologized" to Al Gore[1], who they ridiculed mercilessly. Many people believe that ridicule seriously hurt the climate change movement. I can't imagine what a real world solution would look like, but I would gladly live in a world where those episodes disappeared and we were in a little better spot regarding climate change.

We probably don't yet know what the lasting legacy of PewDiePie will be, but personally I'm doubting the positive aspects of it will outweigh the effects of many of his viewers taking some of his satire seriously.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al...

Al Gore's hypocrisy and profit seeking were the cause of whatever harm was done to climate change awareness.

Placing any of the blame on South Park for exposing it is an example of a dangerous yet all too common idea: tolerate, even conceal, bad behavior lest the overall movement be harmed.

I'm sure there's a lot of legitimate reasons to criticize Al Gore. The problem with the South Park episodes is that:

1. They did not talk about any of those valid criticisms

2. FAR more people saw those South Park episodes and, at least somewhat, adjusted their views of Gore to be more negative without even realizing it, than came in contact with anything that DID talk about those valid criticisms

Reaching more people is precisely the purpose of satire. Humor communicates with a lot of people who don't read the NYT.

> Al Gore's hypocrisy and profit seeking were the cause of whatever harm was done to climate change awareness.

Well clearly Matt & Trey disagree now.

It is quite funny that very few people are actually able to come up with valid criticisms for his climate change advocacy, which wasn't even on the more alarmist side of climate change in 2006.

> very few people are actually able to come up with valid criticisms

I guess that depends on what you mean by "valid" but I think his plan to profit from carbon trading was a clear conflict of interest.

All the conservative people I know are aware of this, so it also depends on who you know.

And if those conservatives find out that Matt & Trey now think they should have kept this a secret to avoid damaging Gore's climate change advocacy, that will only reinforce their distrust of climate change advocates.

Al Gore made more from the Google IPO in 05/06 than from his climate change advocacy, which is something he pioneered since when he was a conservative Democrat from Tennessee. The idea that it’s a conflict of interest is silly in the grand scheme of things.

He was trying to convince people to sacrifice their own lifestyle for the sake of the distant future.

Giving people a reason to think his efforts were a money-making scheme was just stupid.

This is such a silly canard, outside of the eco-primitivists nobody serious is advocating for wholesale lifestyle deflation.

The laughably impotent response to climate change is another issue altogether.

Al Gore was telling us that burning fossil fuels was going to destroy the world. The only appropriate response, if that were true, would be immediate "wholesale lifestyle deflation".

> The only appropriate response, if that were true,

That is an absurdly narrow viewpoint for a website dedicated to news about technological advances. I'm honestly astonished.

Your attitude is inappropriate on a website dedicated to rational discussion.

Also, you must be unaware of what Al Gore was saying. "An Inconvenient Truth" predicted horrible things would happen by 2015. That was a very common prediction in the 90s, actually.

We're past that now and technological advance is nowhere near eliminating or even reducing climate change. It was obvious even in the 90s that zero-carbon technology wouldn't be ready for decades.

The only solution to the doomsday prediction Al Gore was selling 20 years ago was immediate drastic action (which even the Democrats never actually had the will to call for).

If his channel falls into a satire category then the category has massively expanded these days. Outrage porn is not satire and is just going for shock value. It's not satirizing anything, which is often a commentary on how absurd something is and not just saying something disgusting to get views.

I've seen a number of his videos and none of those could be classified as outrage porn. They were nothing like that at all.

I don't follow him much, but his content (currently, he pivoted from a few years ago) certainly has satirical elements.

I guess one could argue that outrage porn is a satire of outrage culture

Would your weariness of satire been the same had South Park instead satirized the climate change deniers and led people to take the issue more seriously?

I would agree about the severe diminishing returns of satire. Indeed, here is something more general on this that I suspect will be of interest. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking-giggling-i...

I remember back in 2012 when he started to get big he was roundly mocked for being overexcitable and cringy on his videos.

It was only after the WSJ articles that I found out that people actually defend him unironcially. Not sure if that's just him evolving or because of some other factors..

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