Softer and Kinder

 If you didn't know, this was originally a blog where I would write in response to Vlogbrother videos, now one of the longest running series made by two personalities named John Green and Hank Green, who are indeed real-life brothers, as indicated by the channel name. 

The blog was soon used for stuff outside of that, but I wanted to go back to this old style.

The description of this video and This comment thread presents a two different kind of nostalgia, that at face seems to be a conflicting description of the past.

Hank, who complied the reunion videos, made this exercise because he was exhausted about the seriousness of the recent topics of the channel and wished for the past which was more silly and fun.

While the comment thread talks about the recent change in the 'punishment' system, where the punishment has fully transformed to the act of self-care. There is one comment which posit this change as a kind of a softening of the medium, which contrasts with the apparent serious nature of the topics.

This 'hate'-ful comment - although I guess it's not really hateful to Hank or John but really to the audience, which might be worse of a hateful comment - made me wonder about... why? And as I start writing, I immediately contrast this to the sentiment of the description of that video. And now we have a topic.

First thing I wanted to explore was why did we wanted to punish people? Why did we put ourselves in strict standards of performance in the olden days? There were tags and challenges and just sense of constancy, best exemplified by daily vlogs, which was seen as a pinnacle of the art at the time.

There is this podcast from Adam Conover with Taylor Lorenz, who both I respect with a distance, about the changing nature of the internet, and some of the comment there espoused this idea that Web Creators are actually employees of a giant faceless corporation and not like an 'artist' or something like that. And thinking about the structure of olden days, there is almost a knowingly and willing sense of subjugation.

Like the early creators fully knew this bargain and went so hard into that toxic nature. I mean, think about Lonelygirl15, which was one of the impetuses for Vlogbrothers in a way. Shows like this portray an interesting tug between text of fighting against a conspiracy and almost a meta-textual celebration of that conspiracy, because the conspiracy is never really defeated, but almost a perverse appreciation. 

Aside - QAnon comes straight from that really early Bush-era lore that people at 4Chan would routinely indulge, and it spilled to the greater public... and that's what makes the thing so fascinating.

But now there is a kind of acknowledgment and avoidance of this contract between the creator, the audience and the platform, but the contract is still there, in a sense.

Why did we stop punishing Hank and John and wanted them to talk about big things? Because we went from wanting a friend to wanting a daddy. The original audience for Vlogbrothers was colleagues and peers of Hank and John and the expression was more like being a youngster and doing young things.

Right, because the pain of the punishment was secondary. The punishment was there to fill in content, because in the olden days, there was not much to talk about. There was simply less content - the famous fact is that half of all human creations happened in the last decade or so. The dystopia was in the future at the time, and we wanted to attain that dystopia. We wanted to create more content.

But obviously things changed, and we wanted less content, and more fruitful ones. Hence the change in taste from silly punishment to big ideas. I wanted to remind ourselves that this old YouTube still really exists in places, but we as an adult moved away from that place. I don't know that place anymore.

There is a second layer to the change on the definition of 'punishment', and it's a humorous one. A punishment can be defined as something the guilty doesn't want to do. And as soft and sensitive self-care as an idea, it does seem to be a thing that Hank and John don't want to do? So, it's still forcing the talent to do something for our benefit in a sense. The contract hasn't changed.

Hank and John are still entertainers, the audience is the prompt giver, and we all struggle under the platform and venue. But the currency and the rituals changed, and that's it. Perhaps in a sense, it's more insidious. At least in the past, the exchange was explicit, but now it's more implicit.

This is a prelude to a long aside - I'm writing this prelude because I wanted to write this somewhere. But the reason that I am here, on the internet, doing blogs for the past 15 or so years, is that I am using the internet as a proxy for the real world. I took this subculture as a case study, basically.

Ever since the onset of the pandemic, spring of 2020, I have taken myself to focus on a tiny silver of the internet as a case study for the greater world, and that is the World of VTubers, or virtual YouTubers. And what is interesting is that due to the older nature of Eastern content, constant churn, and the explicit corporate nature, the old contract is still pretty much there in that world.

And this conflict that I wrote above is the reason I am still collecting data from that world. In the West, there is an understandable apprehension about this old contract, as the podcast is titled, it's inherently exploitative. And one of comments from the podcast sums up pretty well - Adam hates the churn but knows that without the churn he would be dead, while Taylor loves the churn but knows that it's unsustainable. The perfect compromise will be kind of a pseudo-churn, and that's socialism.

It's like the Ant and the Grasshopper. I never liked that story, and I think it's because we're supposed to empathize with the ant, but ultimately the ant is a bigot. Grasshopper is a grasshopper, not a defective version of an ant. The recent rise of AI has me thinking about consciousness and sapience, and I've been thinking back about the Look and its relation to identity and the idea of cognitive zombies.

I think the sign of maturity is to realize that other people are other things and not a defective version of you. There is a nature for capitalism to see human as a single thing, and there isn't.

I had a series of fanfiction about Monster Gals, basically, and the cinch of that story was that human rights were able to develop faster in that world because it was easier to understand that above fact.

I know there was a saying that the sign of maturity is that you shift from working for yourself to working for other people or thing or whatever... 

There is a kind of locked-in features of the human mind. Something you have to get before a certain time, or you won't get it at all. Syntax, compassion, reading the room... there are more stuff.

There is no ending for this post. It's not designed like that. It just ends, like this.