Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

Sunday, January 07, 2024

Another Bullshit Prediction

50 million Americans have not died of the COVID vaccination.

If this was even close to true, the population of The United States would be down around 285,000,000. We are currently at almost 335,000,000.

This is a very good example of The Grifter Culture of Conservative Inc.


Saturday, June 03, 2023

Living In The Age Of Poe

Poe's Law: Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parody or sarcastic expression of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.



Welcome to CringeTok, Where Being Insufferable Can Be Lucrative

On TikTok, cringe comedy creators are gaining large followings and brand deals by impersonating terrible people.


During a three-part special examining the crimes of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer that aired last November on “Dr. Phil,” Phil McGraw, the host of the daytime talk show, played a TikTok video of a 27-year-old woman named Stanzi Potenza as evidence that true-crime fandom had gone too far. In the video, Ms. Potenza said she was so obsessed with Netflix’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” that she stayed home from work in diapers to binge the series uninterrupted.

As it turns out, Ms. Potenza had made a video satirizing true-crime obsessives and Dr. Phil mistook it as sincere.

Ms. Potenza is a cringe comic and actor who describes herself as a “sketch comedian from hell.” She has gained millions of followers on TikTok and YouTube by posting mansplaining public service announcements, sarcastic impersonations of Satan and bone-dry parodies of the horror film “The Purge.”

“Personally, I think some of the best comedy is a little painful,” she said. “It hurts so good.”

As a concept, cringe is deceptively hard to describe. As a content category, cringe is vast, encompassing everything from dated cultural norms to a strategy that musical artists employ to reach real fans. Cringe is not any one thing, but you know it when you see it. On TikTok, you can make a career out of being intentionally cringeworthy in a niche area of the platform known as CringeTok (I know this because my brother, a former lawyer, has been making a living doing cringe videos since the spring of 2020).

Ms. Potenza has a theater degree and completed a six-week acting program at the William Esper Studio in New York, so she feels natural on camera. She ventured into posting cringe comedy videos during the pandemic as a way to continue working on her craft while venues were closed. An early TikTok video of her crying while applying clown makeup garnered hundreds of thousands of views and encouraged her to post more.

She now has more than 3.8 million followers on TikTok — a following large enough that it can translate into lucrative brand deals, bonuses and merchandise sales. Her videos, she said, have earned her more than $200,000 annually.

The making of a CringeTok video

Popular creators on TikTok can make a living in all kinds of niches on the platform, including by doing makeup, dealing watches, being old — even drinking flavored water. But CringeTok is more like putting on a show.

To craft the perfect CringeTok video, creators mine the depths of the internet and their own experiences for traits they can exaggerate. Identifying behaviors that make us recoil, like self-absorption and obliviousness, requires an ironic amount of self-reflection. Cringe comedy creators often build time for dreaming up sketches into their schedules. Filming can take as little as an hour — often from the comfort of the creators’ bedrooms.

These videos are different from unintentionally cringy videos in which an overabundance of earnestness combined with a lack of self-awareness leaves viewers feeling uncomfortable.

In those cases, “we’re not laughing with you,” Ms. Potenza said. “We’re laughing at you.”

Riri Bichri started posting CringeTok videos in 2020, and by April she had quit her job as an electrical engineer to pursue content creation full time. She has built a following of 800,000 subscribers by drawing on 2000s rom-com tropes, fan fiction and her own cringy behavior for inspiration.

ImageMs. Bichri wearing a pink top and beige skirt performs in front of a phone.
Ms. Bichri recording a video as her favorite cringy character: a manic pixie dream girl.Credit...Lexi Parra for The New York Times

“If I’m not embarrassed by what I did yesterday, if I’m not cringing about what I did yesterday, I did not grow,” Ms. Bichri said.

Brad Podray, 40, is an orthodontist in Des Moines whose TikTok account, the Scumbag Dad, was originally a riff on the work of another TikTok creator, Nick Cho. Known online as Your Korean Dad, Mr. Cho plays a wholesome, fatherly figure who treats viewers as if they were his beloved children.

“A lot of my main comedy is based on identifying trends and deconstructing them to the point where they are no longer recognizable from the original inspiration,” Mr. Podray said.

His P.O.V.-style videos feature a series of short sketches in which the Scumbag Dad exposes his fictional kid to progressively volatile situations. Early in Season 1 of the parodies, Mr. Podray steals his child’s prescription pain medication, and by Season 6 his child is helping him assassinate drug dealers.

“I never got to complete the series, unfortunately, because TikTok banned me too many times,” Mr. Podray said. TikTok prohibits videos featuring youth exploitation and abuse, fictional or otherwise, in its community guidelines, but Mr. Podray continues to make other kinds of parody videos. He said he earned about $150,000 a year from his content on TikTok and YouTube.

How the cringe creator economy works

In July 2020, TikTok established the Creator Fund to reward popular accounts and encourage content creation. It initially pledged to distribute $200 million and now expects the fund to grow beyond $1 billion. How much each creator gets, however, can vary.

“Payouts from the Creator Fund are based on a number of factors,” said Maria Jung, TikTok’s ​​global product communications manager. “These factors include what region your video is viewed in, engagement on your video and the extent to which your video adheres to our community guidelines and terms of service.”

It has been widely reported that eligible creators typically get a few cents for every thousand views a video gets, though Ms. Jung wouldn’t confirm that number.

Creators with millions of followers and views per video can make a few thousand dollars a month from the Creator Fund. Having an engaged TikTok audience also allows creators to extend their reach on other social platforms. Meta discontinued their Reels Play bonus program in March, but creators can still earn money from Facebook Ad Reels, a program that operates similarly to YouTube’s revenue-sharing model.

Cross-posting content to increase revenue streams is a common practice among creators.

“It wasn’t until I became monetized on YouTube that I actually started making real money,” Ms. Potenza said. “In order to make this a living, you have to utilize a lot of different methods to make it sustainable.”

YouTube’s business model is different from TikTok’s in that it shares 50 percent of its ad revenue with its creators.

The combined revenue from social platforms can be significant, but the most lucrative opportunities come from brand partnerships.

Ms. Potenza recently created a sketch in which she played John Wick’s therapist to promote the latest movie in the John Wick franchise. Mr. Podray’s sponsors include Insta360, a camera company, and Lovehoney, an online sex toy store.

As their follower counts and average views per video grow, so do their rates. Ms. Potenza secured her first brand deal in 2020 and filmed a branded video for $150. The next year, as her account grew and she hired an agent to help her negotiate, her rate increased to $5,000 per video. These days, she wouldn’t accept anything less than $10,000 for a sponsored post.

Ms. Bichri has gotten brand deals with companies like CashApp, Bubble Skincare and Pluto TV, but she’s unsure how much money she has earned because, she said, her agency hasn’t paid her for work she has done.

A nationwide TikTok ban, proposed in Congress because of the app’s Chinese ownership, would put all creator revenue streams — not to mention hard work — into question.

“Watching a bunch of congresspeople talking at the C.E.O. of TikTok about things they don’t understand was really embarrassing,” Ms. Potenza said. “It makes me super pro-China at this point.

Everything’s cringe

What isn’t cringe today can be cringe tomorrow. Much like death and taxes, cringe comes for everyone eventually. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that brands are interested in participating. Being authentically embarrassing is still authentic.

Wendell Scott, 32, is a production coordinator in Atlanta who instructs Delta Air Lines on how to make effective social media content. He uses his downtime to create TikTok videos in which he provides one side of a cringy conversation in a duet or stitched video with other creators. In one video with nearly two million views, he plays a founding father who discovers John Hancock’s large signature on the Declaration of Independence.

“For me, cringe is something that we’ve all experienced, but we don’t like to talk about it,” Mr. Scott said. “Every single person has had some sort of odd, off-the-wall moment or something they think is off the wall, but it’s actually very real. And I love bringing that to life.”

Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Acronym Alert


word: FOCUS.
usage: When arguing with a MAGAt.
"Fuck Off Cuz U're Stoopid."

Monday, December 16, 2019

Dopamine Addiction

A new one for me: Charlie & Ben podcast.


The sex talk is of particular interest to me (of course), but the segment following that - all about social media and the little jolts of happiness we feel when we get the thumbs up or the little red heart or whatever.

It gets a little iffy when they dive into YouTube and media control, but mostly it's really good.

Fascinating.

Sunday, September 15, 2019

Today's GIF

When you finally notice you're stuck in an endless loop of watching videos of cats doing wacky stuff, you've entered The Möbius Web.


Saturday, May 04, 2019

Living In The Age Of Poe

Poe's Law: 

Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker: (from way back in Dec 2016)

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary year for the former television host, the Kremlin has named Donald J. Trump its Employee of the Month for December.

“No one has worked more tirelessly for the glory of the Fatherland than Donald Trump,” the Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an official statement. “He has set a high bar for all Kremlin employees, and for that, we salute him.”

To mark the honor, Trump’s name will be added to a plaque that hangs in the hallway outside the Kremlin’s H.R. office.

According to Kremlin sources, Trump faced tough competition in the Employee of the Month voting, besting both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ExxonMobil’s C.E.O., Rex Tillerson.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Florida, Trump called the award “a tremendous honor, just tremendous.”

“Obama was President for eight years and he didn’t win this a single month,” he said. “Loser.”

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Overheard

Trump sues Deutsche Bank. Rosenstein quits, signing off with "...America First". Sarah Sanders lies on the North Lawn. Farm income is down. Washing machine prices are up. Trump claims doctors and moms kill newborns. Synagogue shooting.
Trump calls FBI "scum".
Baltimore shooting.
Ohio shooting. Trump defends "perfect" response in Charlottesville.

Everybody ready for Tuesday?

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

All Is Not As It Seems

It starts with a tweet.



Connect this up with the work of Edward Bernays...




...and suddenly, it's not at all surprising that we've gotten to where we are now.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

We Live For Recognition


The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.

Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix. 


What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.


"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."

Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.

For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).


And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".






Sunday, January 20, 2019

Overheard On The InterToobz

Ann Coulter: We voted for Trump and got Jeb.

America: We're feelin' ya - we voted for Hillary and got Putin.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Today's Tweet



From an interview in 1999.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Today's Divide-N-Conquer

Christian Science Monitor:

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, a tag created by activists opposing the forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, you might be in for a pop proofreading quiz.

That’s because, in some locations in the United States, the top trending term, the one that Twitter automatically predicts as you type it, contains a small typo, like #FamiliesBelongTogther.

The misspelled hashtag, and others like it, have enjoyed unusual popularity on the social platform.


- and -

This is not an accident, say data scientists, but the result of a deliberate, automated misinformation campaign. The misspelled hashtags are decoys, aimed at diffusing the reach of the original by breaking the conversation into smaller groups. These decoys can dilute certain voices and distort public perception of beliefs and values.

“This is becoming more like a mind game,” says Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “If they can reach a good amount of activity, they are changing the conversation from one hashtag to another.”

It's a very old problem-solving metaphor: Try to eat the whole steak all at once, and you choke on it. So you cut in into bite-sized chunks - and enjoy your meal.



hat tip = Blue Gal

Sunday, March 25, 2018

Dangerously Online

If you buy into a poker game with 5 or 6 strangers, you don't have to wonder who the patsy is - because you're the patsy.

When you're part of a Social Media community that's free, you don't have to wonder how they make their money when their "product" is delivered at no cost - because you're the product.



Is it time to give up on social media? Many people are thinking about that in the wake of revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica’s questionable use of personal data from over 50 million Facebook users to support the Trump campaign. Not to mention the troubles with data theft, trolling, harassment, the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy theories and Russian bots.

The real societal problem might be Facebook’s business model. Along with other social media platforms, it makes money by nudging users to provide their data (without understanding the potential consequences), and then using that data in ways well beyond what people may expect.

As researchers who study social media and the impact of new technologies on society in both the past and the present, we share these concerns. However, we’re not ready to give up on the idea of social media just yet. A main reason is that, like all forms of once “new” media (including everything from the telegraph to the internet), social media has become an essential conduit for interacting with other people. We don’t think it’s reasonable for users to be told their only hope of avoiding exploitation is to isolate themselves. And for many vulnerable people, including members of impoverished, marginalized or activist communities, leaving Facebook is simply not possible anyway.

- and -

Was users’ trust in Facebook misplaced in the first place? Unfortunately, we think so. Social media companies have never been transparent about what they’re up to with users’ data. Without full information about what happens to their personal data once it’s gathered, we recommend people default to not trusting companies until they’re convinced they should. Yet neither regulations nor third-party institutions currently exist to ensure that social media companies are trustworthy.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Overheard

...on the intertoobz:

11% of Republicans think there's merit to Stormy Daniels's contention of having had an adulterous affair with 45*.

Which means 89% of them think she was first paid $130,000 - and is now being sued for $20 million - to make sure she doesn't say anything about something that didn't happen.

These people drive cars. They get to buy guns.

And they vote.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Fever Swamp

Lies
Damned lies
Statistics
Politicians
The internet

Don't forget what we're up against.

WaPo, Craig Timberg & Drew Harwell:

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.

The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.

I see plenty of examples of spin -and some pretty hard spin - on "the left", but most of the nonsense that qualifies as truly toxic garbage is coming from "the right".

So don't fall for the Both Sides bullshit.


Tuesday, December 19, 2017

It Comes As No Surprise


One big fuckin' lie after another.

Mother Board:

“On express orders from the previous White House, the FCC scrapped the tried-and-true, light touch regulation of the Internet and replaced it with heavy-handed micromanagement,” Pai said Thursday prior to voting to repeal the regulations.

But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General—acting on orders from Congressional Republicans—investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC’s net neutrality process and found it was nonsense.
This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday’s vote.

They just make shit up. And it doesn't matter because by the time anybody can countervail that lie, it's made its way into the bloodstream and there's a whole new lie (or an entire set of new lies) to deal with today anyway.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Today's GIF

FCC spokes-critter answers the public outcry:

The Web


Ajit Pai is a lyin' sack of shit.  Net Neutrality is the deregulated internet. This jackass wants to deliver it into the hands of privateers and rent-seekers.


First - fuck you, Mr Pai. The web is absolutely vital to people who are just trying to get on in their everyday lives. (eg) It's nearly impossible now to apply for a job without internet access. Killing Net Neutrality translates into people having to pay for the privilege of looking for a job. Obviously, there's a cost to it now, but your "deregulation" opens it up to massive potential for abuse.

How do we know this "Plan To Restore Internet Freedom" is bogus? The name. When these assholes are selling something that's aimed at fucking us with our pants on, they give it a name that's exactly the opposite of what happens if they put it into practice.

The Clear Skies Act: allowed for massive increases in air pollutants.

The Clean Water Act: raised the allowable amounts of things like arsenic in drinking water. 

The Healthy Forests Initiative: opened protected Public Lands to logging - including clear-cutting in certain cases.

When we deregulated banking the 1st time in the 80s, we got the Savings & Loan crisis.

Deregulating the airlines - are there more air carriers now? Do they offer better service at a lower price?

How 'bout electric utilities? I seem to recall something called Enron.

Deregulating banks again in the 90s gave us a near-total collapse of the world economy, and a "recession" that we're still stuck in.

When 45* fucked up Bears Ears recently, his closing pitch was "protecting our precious resources".

We don't protect our resources by handing them over to private mining interests.

It's the game of opposites.

And by the way:

  • Uranium deposits in Utah (Bears Ears)
  • Pimping the Uranium One scandal
  • Hillary Clinton gave away 20% of our precious uranium supply!?!
  • We must do something to compensate
  • I know - we'll sell off some of the National Monuments for peanuts and let a few rich guys get a lot richer at tax-payer expense
  • Yeah - that's the ticket
As stoopid and incompetent as Cult45 is, there's a whole school of very adept sharks and flocks of talented vultures cashing in.

Friday, August 25, 2017

White Like Me

This guy reversed the old experiment (Black Like Me), by creating an online persona so he could step into the shoes of an Alt-Right knuckle-dragger.

WaPo interview with Theo Wilson:

After engaging in endless sparring matches in the comments section, Wilson began to notice something curious: His trolls seemed to speak a language unto themselves, one replete with the same twisted facts and false history. It was as if they had all passed through some “dimensional doorway,” arriving from an alternative universe where history, politics and commonly accepted facts had been turned inside out.

There was the idea that slavery was a form of charity that benefited enslaved Africans; that freed blacks owned more slaves than whites before the Civil War; that people of color make up the majority of those receiving aid from America's safety-net programs; and that investor and philanthropist George Soros is funding protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

You mention that in their forums they're also seeking “answers” to questions. What are they trying to resolve?

In today's America, they're struggling to understand why they'll have less opportunity than their father's generation. They also want answers to basic questions about race in America, such as: What's the point of multiculturalism? Why can only black people say the “N” word? How is racism not over when LeBron James and Oprah have huge bank accounts? How is affirmative action anything other than reverse racism? Why shouldn't I be proud to be white if someone else is proud to be black?

You mention that they also have some “fair points.” What are they?

I think it’s a fair point that leftists are widely tolerant of all kinds of people, but are often quite hateful to those who honestly hold conservative values. There are people who actually believe in God with all their heart. There are people who cannot cognitively resolve a guy kissing a guy. It doesn’t mean they’re seconds away from a hate crime. There is a legitimate human need to want to hold on to tradition in any culture.

Mr Wilson at Tedx Talks