Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label poe's law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poe's law. Show all posts

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, January 11, 2023

Wingnuttery

This is probably not a real thing:


What's troublesome though is that given some of the weird shit that comes from these clowns, it's easy to see how people could take it at face value.


Even the debunkment at Reuters waffled a little on it:

News outlets have previously reported that Perry has amplified claims that Italian satellites were involved in manipulating U.S. election results, a charge that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials dismissed as false.

The claim about Chinese thermostats used to manipulate election results has been linked to a Perry associate, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official.

According to the Washington Post, Clark submitted a request in December 2020 for an “intelligence briefing about an allegation that the Chinese were controlling U.S.-based voting machines via internet-connected smart thermostats,” but the Justice Department dismissed the request as “not credible.”

We've reached a pretty bad place when the liars are telling us that the people reporting on their lying are lying.

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Today's Poe

I'll admit that I haven't exactly scoured the entirety of cyberspace, but I did search all the usual suspects for either corroboration or debunkment - and came up empty.


Poes’ 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




 

Thursday, February 06, 2020

Today's Tweet



Today's Poe too.



Monday, February 03, 2020

In The Land Of Poe



WaPo:

Rep. Rodney Garcia, a state lawmaker in Montana, told a roomful of Republicans he believes the U.S. Constitution says socialists can be jailed or shot simply for being socialists. Garcia initially made the statement at an election event, then he reiterated it to a Billings Gazette reporter.

The Republican Party in Montana swiftly rebuked him.

Garcia’s inflammatory assertion first came Friday night, after former interior secretary Ryan Zinke gave a speech at the party event in Helena. According to reporting from the Gazette, Garcia said he was concerned there were socialists “everywhere” in Billings, which he represents in House District 52.

Billings Gazette reporter Holly Michels later asked Garcia to clarify his remarks, and the lawmaker doubled down.

“So actually in the Constitution of the United States, [if you] are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” Garcia told Michels.

- and then -

Anthony Johnstone, a law professor at the University of Montana, told The Washington Post that “nothing in the Constitution of the United States authorizes the government to punish socialists or anyone else on the basis of their political beliefs.” In fact, the First Amendment prohibits punishing political speech, and the Constitution of Montana “expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of political beliefs,” Johnstone said. All state lawmakers swear an oath to uphold those doctrines.

...because of course. That's where we are now. 

The rubes giggle and run off to make this new bullshit part of the "conservative" dogma, while the Press Poodles feel compelled to fact check it - they stopped long enough to go find someone to tell them whether or not the US-fucking-Constitution says it's OK to shoot socialists.


Thursday, January 30, 2020

Today's Poe


It's not real, and McSpocky took it down once he realized he'd posted it without the requisite caveat.



But we definitely know some things:
  1. Poe's Law is germane
  2. There are people out there who'll believe he said it because they know 45*'s a complete asswipe who says that kinda shit.
  3. There are people out there who'll not only believe 45* said it, but will agree with it, and endorse it, and embrace it.
After Alan Dershowitz kinda lost his shit yesterday and doubled down on his theme of The President Can Do No Wrong, it's really easy to see that this Daddy State shit is working pretty good on some folks.

Thursday, January 23, 2020

In The Age Of Poe


Kinda in reverse, maybe? Reality can get so perverse that sometimes when something real happens, it sounds like it came straight outa The Onion's evil twin.

Detroit Free Press:

Sauntore Thomas is reeling from a one-two punch.

First, the Detroiter sued his employer alleging racial discrimination in a lawsuit that settled confidentially. Then he went to the bank this week to cash his settlement check, but the Livonia bank refused to cash or deposit his check. Instead, they called the cops and initiated a fraud investigation — actions that dumbfounded Thomas and his lawyer, triggering another lawsuit.

On Wednesday, Thomas sued TCF Bank for alleged race discrimination, saying the Livonia branch
mistreated and humiliated him by calling four police officers when all he was trying to do was deposit legitimate checks. According to police, the bank's computer system read the checks as fraudulent.

TCF Bank spokesman Tom Wennerberg said Thursday that TCF abhors racism and it was not a factor in how the bank handled Thomas' requests. He said the checks Thomas presented displayed a watermark that read VOID when they were scanned in a web viewer.

Thomas isn't buying it, noting the check cleared 12 hours later. He's upset that two officers questioned him inside the bank, while two others stood guard outside, he said, adding he was an account holder for nearly two years at that TCF branch.


It's not quite completely cut-n-dried - the folks at TCF kinda have a point, partly because of mere circumstance - Sauntore had a whopping 52¢ in his account at the time. And partly because he "made some unusual requests".

ie: he asked to cash one of the checks ($13K- while depositing 2 others totaling $86K), and he asked for a new debit card.

Granted, some of this is a bit red-flaggy, but c'mon, all you have to do is make a coupla phone calls. But that doesn't even factor in when you're going to put a hold on the money til the checks clear anyway.

Normal protocols apply. You tell him you can't cash him out for thirteen large, but you tell him he can go to the bank that issued the check.

And that's the kicker. Not more than a few hours later, Sauntore took his checks to a Chase branch (which didn't issue the checks), and sailed the whole thing right on through.

And BTW - you're not the fuckin' cops. Turn in your little decoder ring and stop playing Junior Treasury Agent. 

Instead of a good customer, now you've got an expensive lawsuit on your hands.

Wednesday, July 03, 2019

In The Age Of Poe

A twitter user calling himself Richard Tator (Dick Tator - get it?) put up a silly tweet:


I think it's a safe bet that he was trying to get in on the massive slagging Piers Morgan got when he said he was looking forward to seeing "his lionesses" beat the US women's World Cup team because Megan Rapinoe dissed 45*, but he seems to have dropped himself in the shit by not recognizing how deep we are in the morass of unreality and competing narratives.

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.

So people swarmed him - apparently thinking he wasn't just being cheeky - and I'm left to wonder if they took him seriously or if maybe some of them were "going along with it" thinking they were being awesomely ironic. 

But then again maybe some of them just wanted us to think they weren't fooled when they really were, and so they were only pretending to be shocked when they were actually arch villain conservatives in disguise trying to get us to think they were on our side when they were really infiltrating our ranks and just trying to stir us up to keep us distracted, and this shit is making my fucking head hurt.


So maybe it's all part of the plan. 

Or maybe not.

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, February 26, 2019

Today's Silly Thing

The Science Post (science, health, satire):

“We regret to announce that all 50 states are now reporting several cases of DKD” said CDC epidemiologist Mark Webber. “DKD is characterized as expressing or believing that one has vast and expert knowledge in a subject which they actually do not. It most often presents in the fields of medicine and science.”

There is currently no known cure for DKD, but scientists are hopeful with more education and isolation, it can be contained.

“We haven’t seen this level of DKD since Jenny McCarthy started spreading her vaccine causes autism bullshit” said Webber. “I fear the DKD level will continue to rise as more and more people with DKD have access to the internet, as well as there being several celebrities with the disease.”



NSA confirms everything is a conspiracy, conspiracy theorists not convinced

Breaking: Anti-vaccers are actually paid Pharma Shills


Thursday, July 05, 2018

Today's Poe


Raw Story:

The far right is not exactly known for critical, nuanced thinking, so it should come as no surprise that it’s not too hard to prank them on Twitter.
A Twitter parody account @DrNifkin, posing as a Mayo Clinic doctor, outraged Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists when the fake physician boasted about aborting Trump supporters’ babies last week.
“When Trump supporters come to my office at the Mayo Clinic, I love misdiagnosing their healthy pregnancies as ectopic so they have to abort their white fetuses,” @DrNifkin wrote last week, the Daily Beast reported.
“That’s murder! Premeditated!” wrote one Twitter user in response.
“I hoped this was bot but seems it’s not, you love that you can rattle the apple cart? You have fun at it!! Do you not know every idol (sic) word you will give account for? These words are murderous. But your heart is cold, ice cold,” he concluded.
For days, the Mayo Clinic had to ward off attacks by conservatives on Twitter who were outraged that the medical center and research hub would employ Dr. Nifkin.
“Sick sick stuff,” Infowars writer Paul Joseph Watson tweeted.
Dr. Rifkin’s Twitter profile identifies him as an “obstetrician at the world renowned Mayo Clinic parody.”

Monday, June 18, 2018

I Fucking Love The InterToobz

This just might be the best example of Poe's Law ever - which is very high praise considering we're stuck here in the time of Cult45.
 Poe's law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, 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.[1][2][3]

Monday, October 23, 2017

Today's Poe


Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a stirring defense of Donald Trump’s chief of staff, General John Kelly, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Friday that it was “unpatriotic in the extreme” to offer irrefutable video proof that a four-star general lied.

“It is unpatriotic enough to accuse a four-star general of lying,” Sanders told the White House press corps. “But to make available a video that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that that general lied is unpatriotic bordering on treasonous.”

Poe's Law:

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, 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 or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.[1][2][3]

Wednesday, February 01, 2017