MIlo Yiannopoulos – One Thousand And One Parsecs

This author’s note originally appeared in the October 10th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

I saw Joker yesterday. Don’t worry, I won’t give away any spoilers. It was every bit as incredible as I expected it to be, and yet in some key ways, not what I was expecting at all.

First, the basics. This movie is dark. Very, very dark. I believe this is the darkest, most terrifying iteration of the Joker ever made. Part of that is because it is so realistic. There are no magical superpowers, no aliens or infinity stones or any of that stuff. This story could have already happened in our world. It could yet happen.

That said, it is clear that the people who made it have deep respect and appreciation for the franchise. It isn’t like The Last Jedi, where the filmakers explicitly tried to subvert all of the things the fans love about Star Wars. In many ways, Joker is a homage to all of the iterations of Batman that have come before it. This could just as well be the origin story of Cesar Romero’s Joker as Heath Ledger’s.

Joaquin Phoenix is incredible. I didn’t think it was possible to do a better Joker than Heath Ledger, but Phoenix has done it. He really draws you into the Joker’s head, and his transformation from a broken misfit to a sociopathic supervillian is believable, compelling, and utterly terrifying. He earned every moment of the eight-minute standing ovation this movie received on its debut.

There is a dramatic arc to violence that very few movies, TV shows, or even books show in its entirety. When a character swings an axe at someone’s head, the scene usually cuts. You know what happened. But in Joker, you see everything. It’s a lot like Blade Runner in that respect. The bodycount is not that high, but the violence really hits you, and stays with you.

If you aren’t in touch with your dark side, this movie will profoundly disturb you. It will also screw with your mind. If you struggle with PTSD, this is probably one to avoid, unfortunately. Even if you think you like dark movies, this one may be too much for you. But if you do enjoy it, you will probably want to see it again, and again. There are so many layers to this movie that a single viewing is not enough to fully take it all in.

Without question, Joker is a major cultural landmark. It is, above all else, a brutally clear and damning indictment of all of us. In a world convinced that guns cause violence, Joker focuses on mental health and the cracks in our healthcare system. In a world obsessed with priviledge and inequality, Joker is about our pathological lack of empathy and compassion.

Part of the controversy surrounding this movie is the gulf between the critics who hate this movie, and the general audience, which loves it. After watching it, I think the critics can be divided into three camps.

First, there are the social elites who are so out of touch with the reality that the rest of us live in that Joker is anathema to their lived experience. It’s not that they hate it, so much as that they’re confused and bewildered by it. They are also bewildered by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

Second, there are the wokescolds who hate Joker because they recognize it as an indictment of themselves. They deride it as an “incel movie” because they know that their woke politics are partly responsible for creating a culture where “incels” are a thing, and that drives these people to violence.

I actually think that this isn’t the case for most of the critics. Sargon of Akkad recently put out a video on this, and while I agree with him that the wokescold critics see Joker as a mirror, I don’t think they see themselves as the people who drive the Joker into psychopathic madness. Instead, I think that the vast majority of the wokescold critics see themselves in the Joker.

In Milo Yiannopoulos’s interview with Jordan Peterson, he made the very salient point that the angriest, most radical people on the far left are, in their personal lives, broken and in pain. Often, they are victims of abuse. Personally, I would expand that to include many on the alt-right as well, but the point still stands.

The wokescolds want to see themselves as heroes working to overcome systems of oppression and inequality. They see themselves as builders, but Joker shows them that all they really want is to burn it all down. That’s why I believe this movie has provoked such a virulent backlash from the wokescolds: because it is a mirror that shows them as they really are, and they are terrified of what they see in it.

Without love, it is impossible for our culture and society to heal. That, I believe, is Joker’s ultimate message. The reason that Arthur becomes the Joker is because no one ever showed him any compassion, empathy, or love. He laughed through the pain until the pain made him laugh, and became the villain that Gotham deserved.

How often do we really listen to each other? How often do we reach outside of ourselves and genuinely connect? A recent study shows that the average American hasn’t made a single new friend in the last five years. Is that you? Is that your neighbor? The family across the street, or the guy who lives down the hall?

It doesn’t take much to reach out. Sometimes, all it takes is a smile—but isn’t that the joke? Somewhere, I hear maniacal laughter…

In the last 5-6 years, I’ve noticed a shift in most of the media content that I consume. Content has proliferated at an unprecedented rate, and the churn—or the rate at which new content pushes out old content—has become one of the driving factors for those of us trying to make our careers in this way.

We see it on YouTube, where three or four adpocalypses have massacred various channels, and where copystrikes have become part of the game. YouTubers who don’t put up content every day, like Tim Pool or Pewdiepie, quickly lose views and subscribers even when they do put up new content.

We see it in video games, where companies like Paradox are now making the bulk of their money on DLCs, some of which make the vanilla version almost unplayable. Back in the 90s, a game was a game was a game. You could get expansion packs for some of them, but that was just bonus content, not a core part of the gaming experience, or the business model.

It’s a huge issue in journalism, where the news cycle has accelerated so much that weeks feel like months, and months feel like years now. Remember the Kavanaugh hearings? That was less than a year ago. The Covington kids controversy happened this year. Everyone is in such a race to break the story that the quality of journalism has fallen considerably, but by the time the corrections come out, the news cycle has already moved on. Fake news indeed.

The churn has also become a major thing in the indie publishing scene. For the last few years, the established wisdom (if there is any) is that you need to publish a new book about every other month—preferably every other week—to keep your entire catalog from falling into obscurity. There’s a 30-day cliff and a 90-day cliff, at which points the Amazon algorithm stops favoring your books over new ones. And now, to complicate things, AMS ads are taking over from more organic book recommendation methods, like also-boughts. The treadmill is real, and it’s accelerating.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I can think of a few things that may be driving it. I don’t have any statistics or firm arguments to back it up yet, just a couple of hunches, but it’s still worth bringing them up to spark a discussion.

First, social media has taken over our society, not only in public life, but in personal life as well. Now more than ever before, we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media to interact with each other. The problem is that these social media sites are incentivized to get us addicted to them, since we are the product they sell—our data, our time, and our eyeballs. Every like is another dopamine hit. Every outrageous headline is another injection of cortisol.

We have literally become a society of drug addicts. The drugs may be naturally produced by our bodies, but big tech has figured out how to manipulate it like never before. And as addicts, we are always looking for our next hit.

That’s not all, though. There’s a feedback loop between the end-users who consume content, and the algorithms that deliver content recommendations to the end-users. When something new gets hot on social media, the algorithms act as a force multiplier to drive it even further. But because of our addiction, and the fact that we’re constantly looking for the next hit, things can fall off just as quickly as they rise. Hence the churn.

It’s also a function of the massive rate at which content is proliferating across all forms of media. I’m not sure how many millions of English-language books are published any year now, but it’s much, much more than it was back when tradpub was the only real game in town. Same with videos, music, news blogs, etc. With so much new content coming out all the time, and so many people on social media ready to share it, the conditions for churn have never been stronger.

But there’s another, more sinister aspect to all of this, and it has to do with the biases of big tech and Silicon Valley. Yes, there is a feedback loop that governs the algorithm, but it goes both ways: the people who write the algorithm can, within constraints, use it to reprogram all of us, or even society itself.

I don’t think it’s a mistake that the churn is worse on sites that are run by big tech, or worse on content creators who depend on the platforms that big tech provides. The authors experiencing the worst burnout all seem to be exclusive with Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, and news sites that are getting hit the worst now (Vice, Buzzfeed, etc) all depended on clickbait tactics to ride the Facebook algorithm.

There are a few content creators who seem to have escaped the churn. As a general rule, they seem to be scaling back their social media usage and developing more traditional income streams, like subscriptions, sponsorships, and email lists. Steven Crowder, Tim Pool, and Pewdiepie are all examples. A few of them, like Alex Jones, Carl Benjamin, and Paul Joseph Watson, are learning how to swim by getting tossed in the deep end. Big tech has deplatformed them, but they’re learning—and showing to the rest of us—that it’s possible to make your own path, even when all the algorithms conspire against you.

S2 E9: Milo Yiannopoulos: Past, present and future

I recently listened to a fascinating interview on the Jordan Peterson podcast, where he talked with Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo fell out of the public sphere when allegations of pedophilia emerged, getting him banned from CPAC in 2018. His career isn’t over, though, and his future prospects look quite bright, especially with the plan he’s been putting together. If he succeeds, big tech and the algorithms will never be able to touch him.

In my post a couple of days ago, I argued that one of the unique advantages of books over other forms of media is that they are timeless. As Kris Rusch puts it, books aren’t like produce—no matter how long they sit on the shelf, they don’t spoil. We are still reading books that were written centuries ago.

If that’s true, then there must be something about books that makes them resilient to churn. In fact, books may be the antidote to churn. That’s basically Jeff VanderMeer’s thesis in Booklife. It’s also worth rereading Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff, where he offers some helpful rules to keep social media and the algorithms from completely taking over our lives.

So as indie writers, what’s the best way to deal with all of this? I’m not entirely sure. Back in 2011 when I first started indie publishing, slow-build and long-tail strategies seemed a lot more viable than they do now. But if there is something inherent in books that makes them the antidote to churn, then there has to be a way to take advantage of that.

I’ll let you know when I find it.

Tag: MIlo Yiannopoulos

2019-10-10 Newsletter Author’s Note