> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.
Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped
They were dedicated to the craft though, there have been countless people who dedicated themselves to pushing the boundaries of their profession and lost their personal lives in the process. Losing yourself to achieve something new in math, art, science, etc. can be seen as a worthwhile sacrifice.
Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation is in service to metrics that please an algorithm so views go up.
If the magicians didn't care about magic at all but were obsessed with optimizing the show around ticket sales it would be a shitty movie.
I am very skeptic of the creator economy, but to play devils advocate:
Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.
So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)
Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)
I created an account after many many years on this site to tell you I have had the same thoughts about this navigation in a higher space, akin to spelunking in a cave system of concepts, this is just another way to explore viable concepts.
It's a horrid part of the cave system imo but it's obviously viable.
Oh wow, then I feel very honoured :) It's neat to have that feeling of one of your "weird" or "niche" thoughts being captured (even if poorly) by someone else, living a different life. I love that feeling when I encounter it here!
I often think of minds as very spatial as well, in that introducing new concepts to a mind requires it be tailored to specific characteristics of that mind, like tuning the parameters of a autonomous vehicle before sending it off on its own into the mind, hoping it makes it deeply within.
The truly impressive and powerful concepts (which I understand to have very specific and complex high dimensional symmetry), are those which I assume are the ones that we call poetic or beautiful or resonant. They are the ones whose shape is finely tuned to resonate deeply with the shared shapes of many many human minds.
Often I think of people in their minds as people in mazes, and there are certain areas of the maze people go to, that sometimes certain neurotypes can imagine well, but others can only treat as a black box (though really, they are the maze itself)
Great analogy! As a performing magician and a big fan of the movie, I get how obsession with a craft can blur the line between reality and performance. But that line still exists. The best actors, creators, and magicians make us feel they’re being real, even when they’re not.
This is why I struggle with enjoying Andy Kaufman's content -- I'm never entirely sure where that line is. I respect his dedication to the craft, but I have a difficult time enjoying it -- on a meta level, it's unsettling.
Kaufman was Daniel Day Lewis-level dedicated to the character, but there are others, Tom Green for instance, who ostensibly was just as dedicated for the first arc of his fame and career, then loosened his grip on the persona with age. I often think about his trajectory compared to the average social media influencer -- he pioneered so many things and has worked in a bunch of mediums while they're basically imprisoned in their chosen persona, doomed to repeat the formula / gimmick / character day in and day out until the novelty wears off for everybody and they burn out entirely 12-24 months later. The ones with the most longevity seem to have been able to retain autonomy as a creator rather than a creation, as mentioned in the article, allowing them to grow and evolve rather than forever being a one-note wonder whose entire raison d'etre is eating shoe polish on camera.
This isn't purely new, either. I'm perhaps dating myself a bit but I recall that over the years I have seen a few actors have this weird vibe where they're never "human", they always "on" and seem like their actor-thing has totally subsumed their humanity.
David Cassidy and Shirley McClain come to mind for me on this.
I realize I'm probably in the minority for this, but for me when people create a "persona" for their media, it turns me away. I prefer watching people who are more genuine, whose content is less entertainment and more just themselves, even if that isn't what the internet seems to be looking for.
I think it's even more complex than that. There's only one human I can understand pretty thoroughly, inside and out, and that's me -- and even then, there are a lot of limitations!
We cannot know all the thoughts and experiences of another human being. Even when that person is 100% genuine, there will be aspects to that person that will surprise you!
And that doesn't even get into the weeds of autistics, ADHDers, and intelligent people (I happen to be all three) -- who learn from an early age they have to pretend to be something they aren't, otherwise they'll face intense bullying and ostracision. And even then, there's going to be something "off" about them ....
One of the problems with modern social media (and digital media in general) is that this is now happening, to some extent, to everyone. This is particularly a problem for children, who are exposed to this so early that they may never internalize the difference between existence and performance.
Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview:
"I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking in front of thousands of people... and I feel like I'm trapped within a performance and I'm freaking out because of it. And 13-year-olds were going 'yeah yeah, I feel like that every day'. And I go 'what are you talking about?' and I realize that the stresses of a C-list comedian were democratized and given to an entire generation.... Social media has made life a performance."
Bo Burnham really does have a lot to say on growing up on YouTube and the effects of social media/always performing/looking for an audience. I agree with pretty much all of it, but the most thought provoking one to me was in his Make Happy special right before his big ending. Him talking about the "Me Generation" from that special - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hNI3YYnWk
If one spends most of their waking hours in front of camera producing video after video it's bound to happen subconsciously whether they like it or not.
And that those who most successful are able to appear magical because they are willing to do things so unreasonable that the possibility doesn’t even cross your mind.
The word "tweet" itself came from a 3rd party developer:
> The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update."
Wasn't the @ also invented by users?
I remember it was fascinating to watch this network self organize and create conventions of its own, that are now used everywhere.
Seems to me like Jarkko Oikarinen or one of his crew invented hashtags, no? Denoting the context of your communication with something like #warez or #hack significantly predates web2.0.
Rather I think Twitter-style hashtags take inspiration from IRC channels in the format of #topic
Because channel names are not hashtags. The syntax is purely because IRC is a text-based protocol, so you need a special way to distinguish channel names from regular text.
That use— to define IRC channels— seems distinctly different than Twitter hashtags to tag individual posts. I wouldn’t be surprised if hash tags started as a nod to that, perhaps even jokingly, but I don’t think you could consider them a descendent.
The thing I always remind myself on this topic is from Dale Carengie's How to Win Friends and Influence People which is essentially you will make an order of magnitude more friends by being interested in other people than you will in trying to make them interested in you
This is good advice for salespeople who need to strike up a rapport in a short amount of time. Real adult friendships are far more complicated due to the time investment required to actually build a friendship.
To add to this, adult relationships are shades of shared adversity, reciprocity, vulnerability, and demonstrating reliability. Avoid transactional behavior, put yourself out there, accept losses but be present in the positive moments.
The problem is that this advice is missing one piece of crucial information - first impressions are everything.
Imagine you start a job, and you meet a coworker, who is well groomed, well spoken, and he just starts small chat with you, doing all the strategies in the book of "building you up". You would probably feel good.
Now imagine the same situation except you have a coworker who is socially awkward and speaks in a monotone voice, doesn't do small chat, and right away starts asking very probing questions. You would probably be annoyed as fuck.
I’m probably the exception rather than the rule, but I generally enjoy spending time with people who are a little more offbeat and intense much more than with people who are well put together and well presented, assuming they have something worthwhile to offer. People like that give me a sales vibe and it’s really icky, makes me feel paranoid. Plus I’d much rather have an interesting discussion about something challenging than share in tiresome pleasantries.
I CAN enjoy and get along with the other type, but it’s much more fruitful and I’m more likely to seek to spend time with those who offer something to engage with. I have very limited time so I’d prefer to spend it profitably.
But yeah, people like that can definitely be more weird, uncomfortable, and downright awkward, for sure. No doubt many in this forum can too. I try to just have patience and suppress my natural irritation for the sake of learning something, or discovering interesting things about a person I wouldn’t have otherwise. I’ve certainly committed the opposite error too, in rejecting people socially who later turned out to be pretty cool and unique despite their flaws and foibles.
But like, for the majority of folks, you definitely need to be able to hang and be comfortably normal, too. I just see that as a less profitable way to allocate my time usually.
I might be undiagnosed / high-functioning autistic spectrum though so take it with a grain of salt, but many people in tech are.
I wouldn't consider basic stuff like grooming to be "trying to get other people to be interested in you" aside from in the really strict sense (e.g. literally going outside at all is trying to get other people to be interested in you).
it does feel like so, the position eventually loses its meaning as more and more data gets crunched by the training process, eventually it's just a context of the past 4 tokens it feels like
Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped