Very good point! He'll be in a reasonably good place when YouTube goes to shit.

First of all, thank you for the fantastic feedback.

We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This is exactly the point I was trying to make in the last section, except I used MrBeast as an example because I felt like it was easier for readers to accept his propensity for cutting corners to make a buck. But yes, I agree, things will get worse. Before it was common knowledge that cigarettes caused cancer, a whole lot of people had to get cancer.

I also think it's important to remember that people don't actually follow Veritasium directly. They follow him indirectly by means of YouTube. If people could actually follow him directly he wouldn't need to worry about competing with AI crap for the attention of YouTube's algorithm. But of course, YouTube would never allow that.

Eh, what you've identified as the thesis is actually just a butt-covering footnote to prevent Reddit-style "ackchually" comments. When I wrote it I was still submitting posts to Reddit.

For sure, they also don't congregate in Williamsburg much anymore.

Something I think about a lot is how the "hipster" movement in the early 2000s was extremely _anti-_consumer culture. They were building easy to repair "fixie" bikes instead of driving cars, they were brewing their own beer and buying/mending clothes they bought second hand. They were moving to abandoned factory loft apartments in similarly abandoned urban areas.

Then, the artists living in lofts, making zines and and knitting sweaters got priced out. And now in pop culture the term "hipster" has largely replaced "yuppie" to mean an elitist, snobby, and extremely pro consumer culture sort of person, which is basically the opposite of what the young people in the early 2000s were doing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I have to imagine that the big corps saw the movement as a threat, and did an classic rebrand on them, like car companies did with the minivan to sell more SUVs.

The feedback loop is the most disturbing part, IMO. You have an algorithm deciding what gets popular, which means creatives hoping to be financially sustainable have to cater to it to some degree, which reinforces the algorithm and removes a little bit of uniqueness from society.

Creative people have always had to consider"what sells" to some degree if they want to make money from their effort, but we've gone beyond artists making "art with some degrees of marketability" into making products called "art" with little of the emotional/intellectual "challenge' that comes with unique works.

My first reaction was that this excerpt reminds me of a piece I wrote two years ago called "[The Airbnb-ification of the arts](https://www.staygrounded.online/p/the-airbnb-ification-of-the-arts", about how artists looking to make a career out of art are forced to cater to an algorithm that favors comfortable predictability over depth or uniqueness. My essay was heavily inspired by "Welcome to Airspace" by Kyle Chayka.

Jokes on me for not reading the byline because it turns out Kyle wrote the book this excerpt is from! lol good for him. Looking forward to reading it.

I'm curious to know if he has a presence on Mastodon or any other Social Web apps, he's a really great writer I'd like to follow.

Haha I know that made me chuckle too