Many moons ago, I was a lad and found a page called The Best Page in the Universe. I loved it, spent hours reading and re-reading all of the articles and had my mind melted by the sheer balls the author had to be so egotistical, arrogant and vitriolic while still making rock-solid points and shattering popular conceptions. Even if I don’t visit the page that often now, Maddox’s writing style and persona has stuck with me and, as I’ve stated many times here, directly influenced my own written voice. Fast-forward to today, where I’ve just finished watching Computing Forever’s video on the ‘skeptic’ community and possibly the whole YouTube community to a lesser degree. Now, while I think the over-arching message of the video is timely and important, it can’t be overstated that the tone is extremely tin foil hat-esque, and I want to dive into both the good and the bad of this video, because they highlight ideas and trend I’ve noticed that I’m squarely on the fence with, as well as offer my take.

The idea CF proposes that all those in the YouTube ‘skeptic’ community will be flagged for demonitization and/or shut down, thus resulting in the community being forced to return to regular working means thereby cutting down on overall content and possibly even the outright destruction of the content all for not agreeing with the political ideas and policies Google believes in, is what I don’t agree with.

First, as I said in my recent Candid piece, some of these folks are making more than enough to live on even if it’s super frugally. I do understand that living conditions expenses do change based on where people live and while that is indeed the biggest snag in what I’ve mused on already, I still stand by that these YouTubers who have decent subscriber counts and solid Patreon numbers will be able to exist should they continue to do YouTube full time, even if it means not buying silly shit all the time.

Second, while I agree with CF’s point that being full-time at something means being able to spend more time on it, I don’t agree that it means the quality and volume will increase. In fact, Feminist Frequency is the unfortunate defining case that I can point to of this notion falling flat on its face. Now, one could argue that not producing anything was the entire point and Anita pulled the stunt she did to get oodles of free cash, but that would require telepathy and humans don’t have that yet. Moreover, I think it’s a silly and unfounded assumption that just because people have more time to do something, they will then put out that something in higher quality and/or bigger volumes. Over the summer last year, I lived stupidly cheaply because I did not want to spend another summer working after having spent the last decade either working full-time, schooling full-time including summers or working part-time while in school part-time including the summers. I wanted a quick break, and one of my goals was to expand on this site; I think we can see how that turned out. If these folks are indeed that motivated then I would have no issue siding with CF on this, but I don’t believe all people are like him and are that motivated each day. Heck, just to pick on Shoe again, she puts out very little content that could be qualified as such and spends most of her time shit-posting. This, of course, is assuming she also doesn’t have a job somewhere, and she very well might. However, since the assumption is that she’s YouTuber-ing full time, it’s fair to say she isn’t crazy motivated. In any case, I think I’ve beaten this point into the ground.

I also don’t agree with the notion of forcing all of us into a community. I get that there are benefits, but sometimes the people who he flashed through in the video say dumb shit, and if what Harmful Opinions has brought up in recent videos and streams is to be believed, I honestly don’t like the idea of being associated with people who don’t read contracts properly, people who squirrel away videos and work they’ve made that makes them look poorly and people who hang out together and comment on all the same shit, sometimes within days of each other. I don’t mind people gravitating towards similar subjects or towards each other for having similar opinions, but the idea that they’re planning out their replies rather than just making content from being motivated to do so rather than being encouraged to parrot what other people are doing is really not that far off from the Game Journo Pros list and reeks of a borg-type collective thought. That’s not my cup of G-Fuel.

That all being said, I wholeheartedly agree that everyone, especially those critical of YouTube’s policies, socio-political stances and what’s going on in the political and social spheres should have a back-up plan and not put all eggs into the YouTube basket. It probably should’ve happened sooner, but it’s great that CF is raising a huge red flag on this because YouTube is a monopoly at the moment. Twitch was primed to be a comparative option, but they’re slow and busy being extremely fucking vague in how they interpret their own rules and that’s really disheartening and alarming, which has led me to rescind my once unequivocal praise and backing of the platform. I’m definitely in favor of those worried about getting bumped from YouTube at some point in time to make accounts on Dailymotion, Twitch, Minds, Vids.me and any other platform you can find because that’s what people did during the dawn of the Internet; there was no ‘home’ to speak of and people uploaded videos every-fackin-where. Granted, it was a clusterfuck but that’s better than being funneled down the pipe to only one solution.

Now after all that, what do I think about the whole situation?

As a jumping off point, folks worried about this should start setting up archives of their work, both on the archival hub website and on their own machines. Get yourself some hard drives and start backing that shit up. See if you can find software that can save the videos in formats that are space-saving to make the most out of the archival process. Hell, go to a place like CVS or Walmart and pick up some CDs and get to burning like we did in the 2000s; it may be old media but it’s still a solid protectionary response.

Next, diversify your portfolio, and by that I mean put your content up on multiple sites. Set up sock emails that loop into each other for password recovery and employ two-step procedure. Use dice/diceware to create your passwords, use different passwords for all accounts and save & print a log of them and store that log. It’s annoying, but people can’t hack a real-life paper and if you get hacked, you’ll have multiple levels of protection, you won’t lose everything and it’ll take time for a ‘hacker’ to pull it off. Make sure none of your emails and information for your media accounts are directly tied to you if you wish to remain anonymous. As someone who has been writing for years before YouTube was even a thing and video media was the soup du jour, I also believe that these folks should embrace written content. That allows for written transcriptions of videos and it’s far easier to get a domain name/full website for yourself up and running for cheap if it’s not video content and nearly all text-based.

Third, learn to live without modern social media outlets. Twitter and Facebook are fucking garbage, and new ones that will come out will probably have some sort of auto-filtering or bot in them. This is why I recommend setting up some kind of website, even if template based like this place, because then you can have it act as a repository and ensure that you have full control over what gets said and what doesn’t. Put up a means to notify users, either via email or text notification, or find a social media outlet that doesn’t have all the negatives of Twitter/Facebook and use that until it becomes garbage, if it does.

Fourth, accept the idea that if people want to see your content, they have to pay. I’m not exactly sure why FC and other folks always feel so bad when people donate to them or pledge on Patreon, but this idea of people patroning establishments or business that make products or provide services that they like is exactly how an idea grows and capitalism works. Not that you have to believe in the tenets of capitalism, but there’s no need to feel guilty about it and no need to push to avoid it. These people give you money because they want you to keep doing what you are doing; embrace that. Obviously don’t screw them, because that’s how you lose your income, but there is no reason to be so afraid of the idea. Again, it’s the same system that ended up creating giant companies like Big Y and Walmart. They may not espouse great ideals, but they are excellent examples of the idea that patronage is how business growth occurs.

Lastly, and the real reason I wanted to comment on this video and topic, be confident and grow some balls. What irked me the most about CF’s video, besides the conspiracy theory level stuff, was this apparent feeling of being scared about all that’s happening with YouTube. Fear is how the social justice crusaders stay relevant; they create hype and confusion, which triggers the average person’s lizard brain to process the incorrect information as information that can’t be parsed or dealt with, thus resulting in lack of understand and fear from said lack of understanding. There is no reason to be afraid of people like that or a company like Google possibly killing your revenue stream and communicative means slowly; seriously, that’s like cutting off your leg because you got some dirt on it. I can understand why people would find that notion terrifying to some degree because it’s tyrannical in nature and helps spread idiocy and propaganda while sectioning out the population into people who agree and people who don’t, which has historically led to some incredibly dark points in the history of humanity.

This having been said, there is zero reason to be afraid of all this. CF says in his video that ‘when you lose your audience on your social platform, you suddenly find yourself at the bottom of the mountain again’, and I just can’t agree to that. Perhaps I’m just a huge outlier, but I could not, would not and do not give a fuck if people in the social justice community were to come after me, slander me, lie about me and push Google to try and shut me down.

I jokingly say a lot of the time when gaming or with my friends is the phrase ‘fite me’, but it’s something I wholeheartedly believe and it’s my go-to whenever people tell me that my ideas would piss off a lot of people and that I should keep them tampered down, especially my views on religion, what’s going on with the media these days, taboo subjects in society and my takes on religions across the world and the believers in certain religions. It’s my signal that I want to be challenged, that I want to challenge people, that I want to talk about shit that sits in the grey area of the world that people find really uncomfortable and that I have no problem throwing down, either mentally or physically, and possibly giving up my life, both literally and metaphorically/metaphysically, for my beliefs. I know that idea is incredibly jarring and smacks of some fundamentalist behaviors, but that’s how much I believe in pushing the boundaries and in the idea of freedom and especially free speech, and is likely the core reason why I am not afraid and will not look for a shit to give about the professionally outraged or the idea of being ‘silenced’ by being kicked off of Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/whatever. If anyone espouses the idea of silencing me for whatever shit I say or whatever ridiculous reason they believe, then my response will forever be ‘Do it, faggot‘.

In summary, if you’re scared of losing your utubs money and your possible dream job, grow some goddamn cojones and get yourself setup so if Google decides to step on you, it doesn’t fucking matter. If I’ve offended any of you reading with anything I’ve said here or in the past, then fite me, fgt.