The Perils of Audience Capture
gurwinder.substack.com
gurwinder.substack.com
The core idea here goes beyond that of creator and audience, though. We are shaped by who our community expects us to be. It then becomes hard to break out the norms we find ourselves in. We cannot escape our community's expectation. Be they parents, friends, or partners. We are locked into ourselves by those that root us.
It's for this reason that solo travel seems the be the great reset of who we are as people. The vague and hokey-seeming idea of 'finding yourself' is really about escaping prior expectations and trying own new personas. In each new city, you can be a new person.
The aspect explored in the article is important not just for creators but for your online persona via social media wherein the participant gets positive reinforcement for specific kinds of posts and that reinforcement shapes their lives in real ways. We become the people that are most rewarded by the platforms. This is both normalizing (as in instagram insincerity) and antagonizing (as with twitter/facebook engagement metrics promoting inflammatory opinions).
I have trouble seeing any good that comes from our algorithmically created personalities.
I stream for myself. I very, very often ban and put my chat in emoji only mode for the very reasons in this article.
I have only ever been rewarded for things I chose to be before hand, as far as I can tell, by my audience or friends.
You should consider the differences between different types of motivations and approaches to audience capture. It would seem the only individuals susceptible to this "unconscious" molding are people who already have unstable identities.
Everyone is in search of an audience, or in economic terms, each producer is in search of consumers.
Once you find a market you can tailor your fit to suit that market. I might start out making leisurewear, but when I discover most of my sales is sweat-pants, I'm likely to focus my attention there, creating more designs in a narrower niche.
"influencer" is a recent career option, so it seems like it's full of unknowns, but clearly it's the same processes. First find an audience, then do whatever it takes to enlarge that audience and make them "buy more tickets".
Music, movies and TV are the same - you might think Jean Claude van Dam movies are formulaic, but clearly he has found an audience that likes that formula. He can't make a romcom because his non-fans won't give it a chance, and his fans won't pay for a romcom.
If you find a sudden audience by going viral, then clearly you're going to try and hold that audience by repeating the formula. And wacko theories always attract good repeat customers, for reasons which are pretty obvious.
One person has perfected this to the point where his audience gives him $250 million when he loses a race, as long as he claims it won. Hmm, maybe influencer isn't such a new job after all (just a new job description).
> It's more economics than psychology though right? … Everyone is in search of an audience
This is not nearly so universal. The word used to describe creators/influencers/artists/politicians/etc that don’t succumb to this pressure is integrity.
If you want to be critical instead of laudatory, you could call it rigidity, but it’s a real thing and some of us value it.
There are a lot of evil governments in the world, and nearly all private companies are functionally evil. You don't want them knowing who you are. That information will only be used against you. The government is not always your friend and your employer almost never is.
It seems to be rooted fairly deep in us to believe that if we just told our stories and had our true selves known to the world--if our reputations portrayed us fully and fairly--we would be not only accepted but embraced by the world. This isn't the case, and it's not for a lack of personal value, but because the human world is not always a benevolent place. It's full of conflict, and it has a lot of terrible people in high places.
As I get older, I'm increasingly convinced that, while I have no patience whatsoever for the intolerant, self-righteous, and right-wing strains of US Christianity, we do need something like religion, at least enough of it to convince people and society (a) that cultural integrity is important and worth fighting for, and (b) that playing a decent role within one's culture, rather than trying to dominate or "influence" it as much as possible, is enough. Sadly, the most effective strategy for preserving a culture seems to be convince people that terrible supernatural consequences will occur if the culture is violated--the most dangerous individuals won't necessarily believe in these consequences, but their potential followers will, and so one could (in theory, anyway) proactively deprive these would-be warlords and CEOs of the supporters they would need in order to seize power. Worse yet, it seems in practice that this doesn't help, because nothing prevents horrible people from using religion to their benefit (in fact, it is historically very common). So... I don't know. All I know is that mukbang is fucking disgusting and anyone who watches it should feel bad about themselves.
I (also getting older) would have ended the sentence right there. I live in NYC, and so I guess in general I don't come across the 'right-wing strains of US Christianity' that frequently.
> we do need something like religion, at least enough of it to convince people and society (a) that cultural integrity is important and worth fighting for, and (b) that playing a decent role within one's culture, rather than trying to dominate or "influence" it as much as possible, is enough.
I think the fundamental problem your trying to address here is that after decades of telling people there isn't any transcendant meaning to life, they've begun to believe it and are ordering their lives thusly.
So, yes the smart money is on silence, or at most, limited speech through an anonymous account, or in person. The stupid, brave money is on speaking truth no matter what. Here's to a stupid, brave future for us all!
What makes our current war different from others is that our enemy controls nearly every aspect the society we live in. They decide whether we have an income. They can destroy our reputations. The end of the world has started (i.e., we are in a state of active war, it is a violent one even if most people don't know it yet, and it will likely escalate to totality although it may take 100 more years) but everyone still has to go to work. That's the problem. If you're facing a foreign invasion, either you kill them or they kill you and either way it ceases to be your problem. If you're at war with an enemy that has the power (by law) to withhold resources and coerce you to work for them, it's completely different, and in general it is more trying on courage, because there are now three possibilities instead of two: (1) you win, (2) you die, or (3) they keep you alive in a degraded state in which, even if you think you're working in opposition, you actually serve a strategic purpose from their perspective (i.e., they can make an example out of you). The indignities and tactical failures associated with the third possibility are what makes humanity's final war, the war against capitalism, so different and so much harder to prosecute.
Insofar as capitalism tends to squash such experiments, because it feels threatened, yes, that is evil. But the good news is that few people would do that for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that they (we?) believe that capitalism is pretty damn good at organizing society, all things being equal, and it's hard to feel threatened by such an experiment. However, given the revolution in technology, particularly with smartphones, all kinds of possibilities open up which have not been explored. Such experiments tend to need champions, capitalists with a magnanimous (or curious) bent that can carve out a space to run, fund, and protect these experiments from predators. Such experiments would be like startups, but with a different success criteria (not just "eventual profitability") and a more comprehensive set of behaviors for the participants (not just "find product/market fit").
It may be time for another round of utopian experiments, but this time supercharged with knowledge of those failures, and adding ~50 years of new knowledge about psychology, society and science. What sorts of minds could arise in these unusual places? Optimistically, in the worst case you'd raise a generation of unique minds that, with any luck, would be highly sought after in the wider society, such that even in the event of failure the participants would be okay. And if they succeed, they can spread and grow, and gradually replace components of capitalist society. (Success is when the real danger starts, of course, because it goes from curiosity to threat.)
I just hope you don't give up on your dreams. If undermining capitalism is what you want, you have to play the cards you're dealt. Capitalism is ascendant, although it is showing tremendous weakness WRT wealth concentration. The world is the way it is, so pick a path that uses what you have. Good luck!
I read twitter accounts sometimes and note that sometimes the person writing is mentally ill, but has so many followers encouraging them, that I dont think they will ever escape from their delusions.
Prior to the internet, they may not have attracted such a large audience, and their life would have been very different.
There is both a conscious and an unconscious mechanism at play here. The unconscious one is probably the more dangerous, because it's harder to control.
When someone becomes morbidly obese and risks dying because of trying to please an internet audience, it's hard to convince me there isn't a strong psychological factor at play.
A major concern from this (at least for me) is to be aware of what you are doing for yourself and for others.
In this case, what is the persona or brand you are creating and deciding whether you want to incorporate that into your personal life or keep it separate.
I feel that a lot of folks who become famous run into the effect that their fans have on them or what they perceive that their fans want from them.
Heck, it really is just an amplified version of probably everyone. We all alter our behavior to some degree based off variabilities in different situations.
The way to escape, I think, is to make a conscious effort, to understand that sometimes -- even often -- you won't please your audience, and that moderation and backtracking on opinions and actions is valid and reasonable, even if your audience will consider you a fake or a flip-flopper.
Which means this is really hard. At least on the internet and for public influencers.
I think the lady doth protest too much.
>On Twitter I cultivated a reasonable, open-minded audience by posting reasonable, open-minded tweets.
The most open minded audience on Twitter is a bit like the most hygienic landfill.
Being inconsistent is the only way to be true to yourself. This is antithetical to having an audience which expects you to act in a certain way. Regardless of how open minded you think the people who follow you are they will stop following you after a point.
This is why having One True Identity^(tm) is antithetical to being human regardless of how much google, twitter, the government and lynching enthusiasts want you to.
To me, there are internally and externally generated desires, and most of the external ones really are mimetic. But internal desires really exist almost anyone, yet for most people they can only bubble up when all is quiet and we're alone with out thoughts. We're so hyperstimulated that there is no space for those original desires to germinate, and that same phenomenon can happen not only for people scrolling Instagram, but also for those creating content.
It's probably the same mental process through which a group becomes often the opposite of their enemy, even though both extremes are absurd.
Not clear how people can get out of this once they are there - the acquired audience is never going to signal 'stop' so the the motivation is just to keep going ever deeper. There is an argument that de-platforming - severing the feedback loop - might be the only way, which chafes against our instincts for freedom of speech, expression, association
The most obvious example of audience capture that occurs to me is Joe Rogan's podcast. From about 2010-2013, it was a comedy podcast that was just starting to get some high-profile guests. My theory is that his numbers with the conspiracy theorists and MMA bros were doing too well to ignore, and the transition into increasingly alt-right commentators was slow enough to not scare off regular listeners. The rest is history.
There is enormous latent demand for right-wing commentary. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity dominated AM Radio and Fox News, but now that demand is being fulfilled where the audience is—podcasts and YouTube. I've seen whole YouTube channels go full right-wing-talking-points, solely based on audience requests in the comments section.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/25/marjorie-t...
I've read about this guy yesterday and a few days before I saw a girl who has anorexia and is using it to build her fanbase.
I think he's done that better than he ever thought he could.
Basically the entire mainstream media went on that route during the second part of 2016, some of them are still on it, 6 years later, not sure why this lady (of whom I had never heard until now) got the short stick out of it.
> In January, after he lost his position at the radio show LBC due to his increasingly careless theories about a secretive New World Order
The only false thing is that there's no secret about it, cue the current war in Ukraine which is fought in relation to that "order" (or the "unipolar liberal order", as the West tries to depict it). On top of that, as a citizen of an EU-member country I experience this first hand, as more and more rights and privileges that used to be decided at the national level (at the highest) have now been transferred to a rainy city a continent away, to some people I have never voted and of whom I know next to nothing (I'm talking about Brussels and the European Commission). This is a coup almost by definition, only that it doesn't involve that many guns (just yet).
A number of people close to Trump did have links to Russian intelligence: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m... ; the most notable examples are Paul Manafort, who got years in prison, mostly for failing to pay US income tax on his bribes, and the NRA Russian spy Maria Butina.
It has not been proven that Trump was complicit in any of this, which is why he's not yet in jail.
Louise Mensch is .. odd. She seems to be very much a publicity seeker, she even started her own social network "menshn": https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/feb/06/menshn-close-l...
> Why the Discredited [Steele] Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation (...)
> No. The Mueller report does not present claims from the dossier as evidence, and many of the issues focused on by investigators did not come up in the dossier.
"So, we were damn wrong on the "prostitutes" thing, someone will most likely go to prison for it (not us, fortunately), but trust us when we say this other bad thing about Trump!"
On a more general note, it takes more and more mental, I don't even know how to call it, I guess hygiene is the word, to remain sane among all this stuff. I mean, as a reader of news and as a citizen (of the world, I'm not personally from the States) who wants to remain on top of things by staying educated on what's happening and why it is happening. It just isn't humanly possible anymore, the alienating forces have become too powerful. That also explains part of the article posted by the OP.
But I think the phenomenon here is that the audience actively and aggressively discourages deviation from the expected behavior, which becomes more and more extreme.
I've seen this even in mild YouTubers, as soon as they make a statement (say, about inclusiveness or whatever) that was out of the norm -- or even, surprisingly, changing the focus of their channel -- a group of very vociferous fans will leave while heaving insults and claiming the YouTuber has "sold off" or is not being true to him/herself anymore.
As an example: I don't know if you're familiar with the current Return to Monkey Island debacle, but some "fans" and trolls are harassing Ron Gilbert because they don't like the art style of the new game. They are judging the previews, because it's unreleased. Now, regardless of what one may think about the style, what the trolls are saying is brutal. They are accusing him of trying to put (and I quote) "left-wing BS" in his new game. All because they don't like the polygonal cartoony art style! A minor deviation from their expectations gets punished with insults.
The feedback loop with an aggressive audience is essential for this phenomenon, I think, and it doesn't happen with Flanders.
The culture war is totalizing, and gamergate was a key point in its expansion across the internet. And itself is another of these feedback loops.
For a while, I was pretty well known within a certain toxic niche. What I learned is that you can't "influence" anything, not very much, and certainly not in the short term (which is the timeframe on which most of us are forced to operate, just to survive). A "brand influencer" can convince a few thousand Pepsi drinkers to try Coke's latest product, but who cares? If any of these influencers actually had something to say, their followers would get fed up and move on to someone else.
It's tempting to believe that the thousands or millions of followers you can get by posting stupid shit will convert when you feel the need to say something important, but conversion rates are astronomically low. All that "influence" evaporates if you have a real reason to use it.
All that said, the good news is that this isn't a new problem. False personalities have been dominant in our psychobiome for decades. In the 1950s, it was the man in the gray flannel suit, the "organization man" who never discussed sex, politics, or religion (or, for that matter, anything else important). In the 2020s, it's insufferable young people trying to make a decrepit, failing economic system appear "cool" and even "woke" (a term no one but Boomers uses anymore). Same shit, new stink. We have lived under economic totalitarianism (whether of the Soviet command-economy variety, or the capitalist "ignore the man behind the curtain" variety) for a century now, and so we've been dealing with phony personalities (and false consciousness) for a long time. If they were going to destroy us, they would have done so by now.