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Comment count is 19
John Holmes Motherfucker - 2018-03-09

Okay, I've been up all night, and I want to go to bed, so I'm going to try to reduce the long essay I've been thinking about since I submitted this to a couple of quick points, GTFO, and maybe follow up after some sleep.

Pretty much everything I know about Logan Paul I learned from this video. On April 1, the day after I turn 60, he'll be 23 years old. That's a pretty goiod excuse for being a clueless narcissistic psychopath on this level. I am pretty sure that at this age, I was something like this, and yeah, he's the worst.

Except that he ISN'T the worst, not really. The core issue is the corrupting influence of social media. I'm no Luddite, okay? YouTube is a good thing, but all sorts of good things can be corrupting. in social media, attention is everything, and that can lead to attention justifying anything. Exploiting a dead body for attention is terrible, but it's so much better than bullying or harassing or assassinating the character of living people for attention, and we all know THAT goes on all the time.


Old_Zircon - 2018-03-09

I came here to say exactly what you just said.


JHM, have you read Who Owns the Future yet? It's definitely a flawed and sometimes disjointed book, but whenever it's on topic and talking about the social implications of interface design and the structure of the Internet it is just about the most on point, insightful thing I have ever encountered on the subject, in any medium and I highly, highly recommend it.


I'm reading Culture As Weapon right now, which is also good. So far it hasn't said anything even vaguely new to me but it synthesizes it in a really concise, accessible way that makes it a fun read for someone who is already well aware of the things it talks about, and would make it a fantastic gateway in to the topic for the majority of people who probably aren't as familiar with the stuff it talks about.

It's kind of The Hidden Persuaders for the age of social media, and then some. I think you'd like it.



Anyhow, I really enjoyed this video but the guy's inability (or unwillingness) to even passingly address the fact that we are all Logan Paul every time we interact on any sort of social media, and the real Logan Paul is simply what happens when someone gets stuck in the cycle of social and financial success rewarding the most toxic aspects of of that, makes me less interested in watching his other videos than I was for the first 2/3 or so of this one when I still thought there was a chance he was going to take that next step.


It would be interesting to do a critical comparison between the career of John Holmes himself and the arc of the typical social media celebrity, because there's a great deal of similarity there I think the golden age of pornography is probably the closest analogue to social media celebrity there is, because of the relatively low bar to entry and reliance on self-as-brand that exceeds even, say, the old-hollywood star system, or the pop music industry since the 1950s, or modelling.


Old_Zircon - 2018-03-09

And I'm not saying that from some kind of position of self-righteousness because it's not like I'm above that shit or anything, we're all soaking in it.

Anyone who was around to witness me finding excuses to talk up the fact that I blew $20 on a Garfield phone (like I'm doing right now) would know that.


The only real difference between me and Logan Paul is that he's an insufferable bro who is (or at least recently was) rich, relatively healthy, and probably getting laid on the regular whereas I have a sweet Garfield phone and some limited degree of self-awareness. So I'm clearly the winner here.


https://tinyurl.com/ycads9c3


Marlon Brawndo - 2018-03-09

I'm a Buddhist and I found it pretty horrific that he interrupted worshipers. People that were praying. And he mocked them. I know Buddha teachers forgiveness but I found it odd that everyone concentrated on the fact that he purposefully tried to find a dead body to film the way a child would want to film bugs. He wasn't really called out for mocking Japanese culture in general.

Throwing coins into a Buddhist fountain and wishing for wealth and fame nauseated me. I need to go chant now.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2018-03-09

.>>>Anyhow, I really enjoyed this video but the guy's inability (or unwillingness) to even passingly address the fact that we are all Logan Paul every time we interact on any sort of social media, and the real Logan Paul is simply what happens when someone gets stuck in the cycle of social and financial success rewarding the most toxic aspects of of that, makes me less interested in watching his other videos than I was for the first 2/3 or so of this one when I still thought there was a chance he was going to take that next step.

But you seem to have had the same experience I did, and you came to the same conclusions. This leads me to the hypothesis that what he did't say, he showed, and he did it by assembling a pretty coherent narrative out of a whole lot of random crap. I'm very impressed by this.

You and I are seeing the forest. He's seeing the trees, and you can't blame him for that, because, at the time, he was planting the trees. I could see him, say three months later, watching the video and hand the same thoughts. But I don't think I'd be having these thoughts, if not for this guy.

I saw another video about this, from s

>>And I'm not saying that from some kind of position of self-righteousness because it's not like I'm above that shit or anything, we're all soaking in it.

I'm older, that's all..

Attention is like money. Seeking it is healthy and positive, as long as you don't sell your soul for it. Over eight years, my youtube videos have been viewed between 1.5 million and 2 million times. That's nothing special at all about that. Some people get that many views in one day with one video. but it makes me happy... really happy-- to know that I gave some people an interesting moment. In 1968, Andy Warhol said that in the future we'd all be famous for 15 minutes, but that future has already come and gone. Now, everybody is going to be famous forever. The internet isn't going to forget any of us.


Nikon - 2018-03-09

He was called out by many people for mocking Buddhism and Japanese culture, as he should have been. And all the same, I'd be perfectly happy to never hear anything from Logan Paul again.


Marlon Brawndo - 2018-03-09

Let's just put this in perspective. Can you imagine what the uproar would have been if he had pulled this shit at a military funeral at Arlington cemetery?


Monkey Napoleon - 2018-03-09

One of the channels I watch (occasionally) I probably shouldn't watch is h3h3, which is one of the bigger (and honestly least douchey, for whatever that's worth) youtube criticism channels. People WERE talking about how he was disrespecting the culture.

With Logan Paul, there is also a discussion in the community about how he gets away with things that have and would make other channels radioactive dogshit because Youtube has sunk a fair amount of resources into promoting this guy's career. A big part of his success has been being chosen by Youtube as one of the faces of the platform. The video with the corpse and the disrespectful tourism is not even the tip of the iceberg with this guy. The message this sends about what Youtube's real priorities are is... not great.

I totally reject the idea that the difference between Paul and you or me is money age and popularity, or that Social Media as a phenomenon is responsible for him. Social Media didn't make him an asshole, it just enables him to be an asshole where everyone can see.

People said the same shit about mass-produced books, radio, film, television, the internet. Social media is absolutely no different. It's a huge leap forward in communication, and something that will be totally necessary if people ever want the world to get better. The failures and the dark sides of it are endemic of a more general failure to fix our shit. Fake news, skepticism of plain fact, uncritical acceptance of ridiculous conspiracy... all of that shit persists and is a problem because we've failed to teach people what thinking is.

Blaming it on social media is kind of like saying we should all eat raw meat because fire is too dangerous to let people use.


Old_Zircon - 2018-03-09

"But you seem to have had the same experience I did, and you came to the same conclusions. This leads me to the hypothesis that what he did't say, he showed, and he did it by assembling a pretty coherent narrative out of a whole lot of random crap. I'm very impressed by this. "

That wasn't because of his video, it was because I figured this shit out by the time I was like 15 back in the mid 90s simply by being aware of the world I lived in (and I'm sure you and many other regulars on here had similar experiences), because it's kind of self evident and not new, but as he says the difference now is that it has been radically accelerated and stripped down to its bare essentials. Or maybe it was Nato Thompson who said that, I was reading more of his book on the bus a minute ago. I got three hours sleep last night, so my thinking isn't exactly at its most organized.

Either way this is one of the best videos of its kind I've seen but it really seemed to me like he didn't make the leap because he didn't make the leap, it's a common problem with videos made by Americans under 25 or so who never experienced anything else (if you're a bit older or grew up in a different culture that wasn't so thoroughly saturated so early, or relates to the Internet differently, then you tend to have a different perspective on it, but most of the latter isn't in a language I understand and most of the former is people our age who don't engage with Internet culture in the same way as people who were born in to it so for all of our increased perspective on what it takes away we miss a lot of what it gives.


Old_Zircon - 2018-03-09

MN, how is h3 doing these days? I used to check in on him regularly but lost track about a year ago. I always appreciated his ability to appeal to a broad swath of the Reddit crowd and introduce them to ideas they'd reject out of hand from someone like this or hbomberguy.

I kind of lost it when he started doing too many collaborations with other, douchier Youtubers, because I didn't really like his stuff enough to make it worth sitting through the douchy collaborators' contributions.

I was worried Salvia Erik was headed the same way but so far he seems to have kept it under control.

Social media didn't make him who he is, but it raised him up because he is a perfect example of the kind of person who benefits the social media business model the most, and the fundamental structure of social media platforms in general (and more broadly, any platform that has an upvote/karma/whatever metric that is tied to visibility) inherently pushes all of its users toward that way of relating to each other and the world. It affects us all to different degrees but it is absolutely baked in to the fundamental structure and as long as social media is primarily a private platform for datamining, mass surveillance and social control* rather than the public utility it should be, this will continue to be a problem.





*See: the well known Facebook mood-manipulation experiment of 2014 https://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-fa cebooks-manipulative-experiment/ and the less openly collaborative and less publicized role Facebook has had in stifling protest in the Phillipines https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-dut erte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-faceboo k for starters


Old_Zircon - 2018-03-09

"People said the same shit about mass-produced books, radio, film, television, the internet. Social media is absolutely no different. "


And in all cases they were not entirely incorrect, because the real word is complex and no major paradigm shift in public communication has been unambiguously god.

However, ignoring the differences in scale, speed and penetration between the the Internet and the previous technologies you mentioned is just ignorant, willfully or otherwise. It's not even close to reasonable to equivocate between the social ramifications of the rise of print technology over centuries with what has happened with the Internet in the past two decades, even allowing that both ultimately have had comparably transformative effects on human society.


Monkey Napoleon - 2018-03-09

h3h3 is doing alright I suppose. They've decreased the pace at which they release videos significantly, and have devoted most of their time to a podcast they started around the end of last year. I only catch snippets of it because I find it a little boring, but if you're not a fan of some the douchier people they associate with, you probably won't like the podcast very much. Ethan's strength, and what makes him kind of interesting as an interviewer despite not yet being a pro at it, is that he's very accepting of people and leaves it kind of ambiguous how he feels about certain people. A while back he had Jordan Peterson on, and however people feel about that guy, I think it's helpful to listen to what he has to say when he's in a non-adversarial setting before your opinion on him is completely set in stone. Ethan is good at that without falling into obvious traps or coming off like he's sucking the guests dick (see Joe Rogan).

As for the rest, of course the internet has quickened the pace of these things, but that's the only difference and I have to wonder how much of a difference that really makes. I have to wonder what the value in dispersing and gathering feedback on ideas more slowly actually is, and if there is any value in it, does it outweigh the egalitarian nature of an instant global communications network.

It also makes me wonder about the motivations of people who rail against this new age. One of my biggest philosophical beliefs has always been that controlling the flow of information is the same thing as controlling thought, and at it's root, controlling thought is an attempt to TELL people what is right and wrong. This is in no small part how we got where we are now. Angry edgelords have repeatedly tried to tell me that they have no patience for wrongthink, and that if people don't get it by now then they should be destroyed. This has always felt, to me, to be the exact same psychological place where bigotry comes from in the first place, and it seems just as futile.

I'm not sure what value there is in stroking our beards and saying "hmmm yes, this is slightly different than before," and it always makes me suspect that the underlying message is "this is a bad thing that should have never happened." Of course, it isn't.

This is wandering off into wank territory, so I'll spare you the huge blocks of text examining comparative ethics and just say that if we let the negative aspects of technology hold us back from fulfilling our potential, then what the fuck are we even doing here?

Essentially, what's your point?


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2018-03-09

>>>One of my biggest philosophical beliefs has always been that controlling the flow of information is the same thing as controlling thought, and at it's root, controlling thought is an attempt to TELL people what is right and wrong.

This seems to me to be the old Gamergate "SPEECH IS CENSORSHIP" nonsense, only in reverse. If people are free to do what they will, telling them what you think is right is not going to usurp their freedom, and "controlling the flow of information" can be used to applied to all sorts of necessary functions. Changing the channel on television is a form of controlling information.

When you organize thought, you are controlling thought, We can control our browsers, filter our inboxes, edit the comments on our blogs, we can tweak and focus our thoughts by putting them in the form of words. In America, Freedom of the Press is enshrined in the first amendment, right next to Freedom of Speech, and that has always meant the right to edit what you publish.. Censorship is when the government controls your website. When you control your own website, that's called "EDITING", and that's how we can all impose standards, groups and individuals can create their own home for their own use. The comments on NPR.ORG, or Anita Sarkeesian's YouTube channel shouldn't have to be forced to conform to the same editorial standards (i.e., none) as Reddit or 8chan.

Censorship, (for purposes of this conversation; there are other definitions) is the centralized use of overall power to control ALL thought within a society

Monkey Napoleon, I may be responding to the issues you evoked in me, and not your actual opinion. You talked about your main beliefs, i talked about mine. We're both interested in freedom, right? We may not be as far apart in our thoughts as in our words.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2018-03-09

>>>I'm not sure what value there is in stroking our beards and saying "hmmm yes, this is slightly different than before," and it always makes me suspect that the underlying message is "this is a bad thing that should have never happened." Of course, it isn't.

Of course it is! Bad things and good things happen on social media. We're all here on a site that celebrates and criticizes social media because we're participants and fans. The communities of the future are being invented right now, and we're all part of that, and that's why we rub our beards, and talk about where we're headed. There are enourmous dangers. It's a documented fact that Steve Banner came to politics directly out of the internet culture surrounding Gamergate. Trolling has become our mainstream political culture. Our social order is being dismantled, mostly because one group wants to piss off everybody else.

Our customs and our technologies are going to have to have to evolve, or were doomed. First came the automobile. Then came brakes. traffic lights, sidewalks, driver's licenses, speed limits, street lights, drunk driving laws, seat belts, air bags, and crumple zones.


BHWW - 2018-03-09

I had no idea who he was, just another one of these Youtube personalities who came up via Vine and seemed to have suddenly materialized from no place, fully formed with 2 million followers, and you are never aware of them of until one of them ends up having to tearfully apologize for offending people after a prank video goes wrong.


Scrotum H. Vainglorious - 2018-03-09

It pleases me to know that YouTube is still a money loss for Google.


Nikon - 2018-03-09

Heck yes. After the recent purge I lost all hope for the platform.


somedongus - 2018-03-09

I like this place(and others that rhyme) because it's the opposite of social media. I'm not saying its anti-social media but when you are literally just a made up name on a screen you can express true feelings & opinions without having to worry what your mom or your boss or fucking anybody else thinks. Sure, that mostly just translates to grotesque trolling and jokes(sometimes great ones), but sometimes I think it produces true insights into culture, and it's worth putting up with the garbage to get the gold. This place is gold!

I hope Logan Paul dies in a grease fire.


cognitivedissonance - 2018-03-09

One of those people I never knew was a thing until I had been told his career was already radioactive.


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