some thoughts about lefttube lately

I think the lack of empathy from leftist content creators is a microcosm of a much larger issue that is going on culturally. There is a norm of cynicism and nihilism particularly around gen z and millenals and whilst it doesn't surprise me , ppl are projecting it on the only things they have control of which typically tends to be online spaces

alright. lots to say. and this is probably overly spicy and critical and i know saying i dont mean it personally to anyone is basically just lampshading which arguably makes it worse, but idk man i can only write how and when i write. my apologies. i think a significant driver of the attitudes you document and present come from, ironically, these often self-avowed Marxists not doing the dialectical materialism on their chosen field of influence before they get into it, and there's a pretty simple reason why which i'll get to. turbot;dr: creators want to have their cake and eat it, too tl;dr before i get rolling for those who want to glaze over or bounce: "leftist" and "content creator" are, inherently, definitionally, mutually exclusive things. you cannot actually be both, and people who try are maybe kind of lazy, ignorant, stupid, deluded, or narcissists in at least some mild measure. probably some melange of all of them. and this is where i probably make most people mad and get them to jump in the replies and yell at me. and, second lampshade here sure, but i don't think being ignorant or stupid or a narcissist are actually bad or disqualifying things for a person to be. everyone is human, humans can be those things, there's nothing wrong with someone just honestly displaying some of those traits for some things, because it's tangibly impossible for one person to know everything well enough that they can be good at it all. not going to happen. i don't think less of anyone just because they do one thing kind of - or even very! - stupid, especially those things that are ultimately relatively unimportant to material reality such as the things we all do for leisure or to tune out the struggles. it's fine. truly. so long as they're honest about it and willing to hear out other positions. anyways! to get to the meat, i think the thing being discussed here is that these people that call themselves content creators and find themselves at odds or in arrears with their communities just... don't understand the privilege they hold. this is an attention economy. you are engaging in the attention economy. you are putting the products of your craft (and hopefully some art) onto platforms owned by large algorithmically driven companies and inherently are competing for attention. you do this because you want the thing you have created to reach people and grab their attention, so that the next thing you do hopefully has some built-in retention attention. enter the gears of end-stage capitalism, right. content creators are forced to become content creators, ie: product producers, rather than artists or writers or thinkers or scholars or painters or musicians or documentarians or multintrsumentalists or whatever, because those things, if the intent was to spread their works far and wide for greater return on investment, required infrastructure that used to be handled by a literal patron. a publisher. a producer. whatever. and the tasks of engagement were delegated to marketers, support staff, etc, so that the artist - the maker - could focus on making. now these online solo creators need to do it all themselves, for far less lucre than before. that's, coincidentally, why the ones who seem to value balance in their lives need to grind EXTRA hard and start shooting for brand deals and agreessively grow their parallel income streams so that they can afford to pay editors and researchers to do those parts for them so they can focus on being the north star and the public face, which ironically makes them more susceptible to dilution of the message by needing to take advertiser friendliness into account and so on and soforth. this is why i say that "leftism" and "content creation" are mutually exclusive. to be a content creator is to buy in to your role in the attention economy machine, which is inherently oppressive, extractive, and hierarchical. it also absolutely shatters artistic intent and authenticity of human discussion and community building - things that are supposed to be paramount to the left - through capitulation to cold, inhuman market forces. i don't think you can actually be both. so like, it's simultaneously confusing but also makes complete sense that it's online leftists that have the most trouble with this. it's confusing because we're *supposed* to be the ones that understand all this. we're the ones who are supposed to be the dialectical materialists that understand that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, that neoliberal hegemony by design ("it's a feature, not a bug! leopards are eating your face!") misinfiorm, disinform, and straight up gatekeep reality from the proletariat to selfishly propagate itself. that's the whole point of neoiliberal capitalism. no one knows that better than us. and yet we are the ones who forget this the instant anyone that we previously thought was on our side trangresses against our particular version of what leftism means, because dialectical materialism stops at the gates of self-reflection. BASICALLY, what I'm coming down to, is that figures amidst "lefttube" or 'the online left" tend to spiral when they come up against struggles in their communities that are nearly always struggles because the creator wasn't prepared for or completely misunderstands their role in the parasocial contract, and it's probably because they didn't really think hard enough about what they were doing to begin with, often not even doing the first recon steps required to learn the shit they dont know they need to learn yet, and those situations in my lived experience are *often* products resultant from the uncritical hubris of unrecognized privilege. the privilege of access, the privilege of platform, the privilege of audience, etc etc. not to mention the inherent privilege of being able to do this for a living in the first place. dialectics rear their head. how many of the most successful leftist youtubers or other social media plaform holders are like, phds, or former academics, or people who benefitted from prior associations to established players in an associated space like comedy or letsplay streaming or if your uncle is cenk uygur, etc. those aren't things you average leftist or anarchist or communist or whatever have. but these creators, who don't have the institutional support required to not have to do their own deep-engagement press tours every week to support their new video have to get in there and wear the mask of approachability and we're-in-this-together only to crash out and flail when their communities take them at face value and treat them as peers rather than pedestalized specialboys and start questioning them or pushing them to be critical of things they were previously uncritical towards, and treat it like some manner of line has been crossed. they call it Parasocial, wash their hands, and move on. so, like i said, you'd think anyone actually dyed in the wool for this shit would do the due diligence to understand the realities on the ground of what they're doing. who wouldn't place themselves in arenas where they can be contacted by and interacted with on the complete spectrum including their audience as well as their haters and complete strangers, and then play woe-is-me for being challenged on stuff. what the fuck did you think was going to happen? not that? because if you didn't see this coming i have serious doubts about your qualifications re: thinking things through and doing things properly, which *seems* to be the purpose of the things you say, so forgive me for respecting you and trusting you less the second you treat an engaged listener who is trying to interact with you in a natural human capacity like a parasite who you don't owe anything. because you're right! you're a human! you don't owe me shit! i ASSUME you are performing a persona, a simulacra of your real self, to keep your own psyche safe and to give yourself the requisite distance from the audience to stay impartial and to act with actual authority and integrity since that's what you say you want to do and are oing. oh you didn't do that? huh. maybe you're kinda stupid and not as good at this as you thought you were. that must be hard to hear from a cockroach. sorry about that. ~~~~ right, and the coda here is that, yup, i agree with elliot. none of that above scrawl was directed at elliot. i hope if elliot is brave or bored enough to read all this he doesnt take it personally because yeah it's 1000% directed at his peers and 0% at him because elliot is maybe the only person, maybe robert evans too, who understands this at all.