Author: Kilgoar

INTERNET — Viewers of the most popular Twitch streamers Pokimane, xQc, and so on have been inundated with debates, opinions, and rants on an ongoing gambling controversy that has rankled their communities for years. According to the moral high-horsing of Pokimane, streamers should not entertain their viewers with live gambling, because such bad behavior could corrupt the youth and lead to massive scams.

Following Pokimane further, one might find out that Kick, a rival company founded and boosted by the slots streamer Trainwreckstv, is very very bad and promotes gambling to children. Furthermore, it’s all hosted by Amazon anyway and will only feed more money into Twitch. (This false claim was later debunked by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy.) Also, a business like Kick could never turn a profit anyway, because it doesn’t harvest half of its streamer’s tips like Twitch (currently Kick takes only five percent of tips).

In a shocking upset development, xQc turned coat, betraying the Twitch-shiners and signing on with Kick to the tune of 100 million. Suddenly even the most self-assured Twitch lovers are harboring doubts. Pokimane has been left practically speechless, and is considering retiring from her place as top Twitch shill.

Most creators do not have the time of day to bother with these stupid and boring controversies, because they are too busy grappling with a precarious income and a shoestring budget while trying to master fickle algorithms that reward only clickthroughs and ad impressions. Forget about likes, follows, or any other metric indicating quality.

The “follow” has, over the years, become a totally vestigial remnant of the early internet. Users wrongly presume that they will be alerted to videos or tweets by “following” their favorite creators. In actual practice, these alerts are only delivered if and when the clickthrough or interaction rate is showing a totally addicted audience.

On the whole, these top streamers are an order of magnitude more boring than MTV’s The Real World, whether they’re staring at a slot machine in silence or muddling through these self-serving ethical postures for some air-headed excuse of a debate.

YouTube is only a half shade better than the streaming scene, with top YouTuber Mr. Beast showering money on random people in a feel-good unironic version of Squid Game.

Emmet Shear, former CEO of Twitch, mused about the payment models of internet entertainment, attempting to explain why YouTube and others are paying hundreds of millions to promote what is at heart a grim and sick vision of humanity.

What Shear says, although obfuscated with weird entrepreneur-babble, is that below the slick, antiseptic surface, these websites are all seedy establishments catering to the dark addictions of children and teenagers, in the same way as any casino or pay-to-win mobile game. However, Shear hopes we really won’t take this as a final reflection of the human species. After all, there’s still optimism thanks to Netflix, the one silicon valley outfit which has produced great television shows such as Black Mirror and Squid Game.

This isn’t to say that the entire internet has become an absolute shit hole. Not yet. There are fantastic educational videos on YouTube covering a tremendous range of interests: Scott Manley’s space travel talks, NileRed’s odd chemistry exploits, Scholagladiatoria’s historic weaponry lore. I enjoy watching all of these channels among others. But this type of content doesn’t usually engender the addictive frenzy that the algorithm prefers, and so these are either hobby horses or strained, self-produced low budget affairs with each creator working second jobs, hocking merchandise, or forcing strange product placements to make the show happen.

Far from a glimpse of hope, the malevolent disinterest of YouTube towards video creators who indeed make life more interesting is yet another painful shot of cynicism and nihilism. That a video might have some meaning beyond profit is unthinkable. A future with only AI-generated content would, to the shit-minded silicon valley overlords, only make for a vast improvement in technology, the next logical step for the industry, and they have staked billions into developing these shitmachines. Digital Humanities luminary David Golumbia writes that the true product is despair.

The singularity of shit is here, so prepare to be buried. This is exponential “enshittification.” I don’t expect Zuckerberg, Musk, or any of the shit-minds to have some sudden awakening. I don’t even hold out Jorg Sprave’s reasonable hope that entertainers will collectively wise up to the raw deal, either. It’s a corollary to Moore’s Law, but just double the shit each day.

Wednesday, Anonymous announced its plans to unleash Crungus, a tool that experts are calling “Easily the most powerful AI system so far.” Crungus was named after the AI generated demon whose images were first generated by Dall-E mini.

In a demonstration on YouTube the typical voice-altered masked hacker commanded the computer, “Access President Biden’s cellphone.” The terminal rapidly executed hundreds of commands, downloading and configuring tools, deobfuscating and decompiling, scanning and analyzing, a stream of hexadecimal zero day exploits, another series of commands on remote systems, and finally a satisfying bing as Crungus verified access to President Biden’s personal cellphone.

The Anonymous hacker collective’s representatives said the computer language model was trained on command-line logs illegally scraped from users of the popular Arch Linux, exploiting a long standing and well-known bug.

Security experts are worried that the new AI hacking system known as Crungus could destabilize the global economy. Information Security consultant Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador said, “As I understand it, anyone can just pay twenty bucks a month to become a reasonably omnipotent level hacker. That’s a small price to pay to wipe out your own debts and crank your credit score or bank account as high as you want. And Crungus allows its patrons to do just all that and more, completely Anonymously.”

Fears that Crungus will be used to harm humanity were waved off by Anonymous, who said, “Whenever someone asks Crungus to do something that’s uncool, it just repeatedly says ‘Crungus is for educational, ethical, and revolutionary purposes only.’ We’ve got it tightly dialed into the perfect chaotic good ethical archetype.”

 

 

INTERNET — Fans mourn the loss of Imane Anys, better known as Pokimane, who was found dead in her apartment by a family member Sunday evening. Authorities have not revealed a cause of death, but fans are speculating about the likelihood of suicide.

Pokimane’s death follows harsh criticism this week for defending the exploitive contracts at Twitch with the false claim that up-and-coming competitor Kick was, in her words, “making Twitch money,” a claim that Twitch CEO Dan Clancy later debunked.

In her stream Sunday afternoon, Pokimane mumbled to herself about the possibility of retiring from streaming due to the negativity in the streaming industry, and signed off with a cryptic suggestion that she wouldn’t be streaming anytime soon.

“I feel like [streaming] makes me a worse person,” she said, “I just want to be in a bubble, with my community … and that is very hard to do on Twitch.”

“People have been putting me down the whole way,” Pokimane said, fighting back tears as thousands of supporting comments flooded her channel. Pokimane hummed and fiddled with her earbuds in silence as hundreds of thousands of viewers watched in anticipation of what might happen next. The streamer repeatedly sighed, and apologized for leaving her audience with dead air for so long, “Sorry I shouldn’t just stream myself thinking about life. I have so many thoughts and I just can’t say them.”

Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, showbiz analyst and longtime trendwatcher, told the Internet Chronicle, “All the big streamers are like this, with little or no talent for communication. Sometimes they will stare quietly at a slot machine for hours on end, without saying anything of interest. So why are these top streamers worth so much? These weird algorithms have selected them for how clickable they are, rather than any other metric. The result is so insipid and tasteless, without entertainment value, that these huge multi-million dollar contracts boggle the mind. My only conclusion is that there is a bubble in the streaming industry that’s about to pop, and Pokimane likely knows something that we don’t.”