You Don't Build A Movement By Making YouTube Videos, Son.
The time has come, my friends, to sook about weird internet people. Into the fray!
The man who would be known as Vaush (source: Vaush/YouTube)
The internet is a horrible place. Absolutely terrible. Don't ever go on the internet (except to read my pieces of course...). But if by chance you happen to go on YouTube in the near future, and you're a socialist (first mistake!), then you'll likely find your feed bombarded with recommendations for various internet personalities I have resorted to calling weird internet people, for various reasons. But first, a history lesson.
Long ago, in the dark ages of 2015-2016, YouTube politics was dominated by right-wing reactionaries and various other flavors of conservative. The fire of GamerGate was burning, “Anti-SJW” politics was all the hype, and a certain somebody had just won the US election. It was painful to see. Kraut, Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Thunderf00t... the amount of weird internet people pushing out reactionary content was too great to list.
And so, being marginalized on the platform, leftist media consumers and content creators came together, and “BreadTube” was formed. The name comes from Kropotkin's famous book The Conquest of Bread, and it was initially a small group of leftwing content creators: hbomberguy, PhilosophyTube, Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis and Shaun, then known as Shaun & Jen.
This piece was partially inspired by a BadEmpanada video I watched quietly while sitting at my desk one night, but that video only confirmed a few of the feelings I having toward leftwing content creators on various platforms. I will address a few things in this piece, and it might be a long because I have a lot to say about these weird internet people, and I'll go into each one separately to voice my criticism etc.
Ready? Let's dive in. Also, this is not a hit-piece, it's an opinion-piece. I'm going to try and remain as impersonal as is necessary. Angrily share this around though I need to push past the average 15-17 readers I usually get on my articles, wink wink.
EDIT: Just in case you were wondering: I do, in fact, respond to DMs over twitter/discord. Find them here if you feel so inclined. Wink wink.
Part One: Tactical N Words and Tedious Citations
Vaush, again. (source: [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/VaushV/comments/ey0su1/vaushwhenheseesabadtake/)
Vaush, or “IrishLaddie”, or whatever else you want to call him, has humble beginnings as someone who would call-in to Destiny's streams and “debate” him (more on “debating” later). After a while, he gained a following, and then started streaming independently, getting banned of twitch hilariously for controversial statements about Israel which I will NOT get into because I value my tiny platform.
Anyway, Mr. Vaush has been mired in controversy since day one, which I guess is a winning PR tactic because his subscriber count has been on the uptick these last few months, and good for him. Context out of the way, allow me to now talk about my main criticisms of Mr. Vaush.
When Vaush is criticized by conservatives and other rightwingers, they mainly just call him fat and ugly and insult his partner. Some leftwingers do this too, and I detest it, primarily because when you criticize someone like Vaush, you should just address their ideas and behaviours, not their appearance. Also, terminally online racist shut-ins calling Vaush fat is pretty funny. Not because I like it when people call Vaush fat, but because those shut-ins in question probably haven't left the house for months, coronavirus aside.
Mr. Vaush, with his background in gaming (already a red flag), is what many would refer to as a “big shouty white man”. Online gaming does not have the best reputation for being fair and nice, and Vaush, being the product of such an environment, is really no different. His “debates”, if they can even be called such, amount to little more than shouting matches, in which Mr. Vaush shouts very loudly at some racist fifteen year old while playing Bloodbourne. Now, not to throw shade at people who enjoy shouting matches, but don't call them “debates”, because it's an affront to the respectable practice of, well, actual debates.
I won't address the tactical n-word thing, because it's been talked about to death, and there's nothing I can really add to the conversation.
I get the impression that a substantial portion of Vaush's viewers, like the viewers of other weird internet people, develop parasocial relationships with him. This alone isn't out of the ordinary, it happens much more often with internet personalities, but I would like to talk briefly about how this affects the state of internet d i s c o u r s e.
When political discussions start and someone inevitably mentions Vaush, the conversation suddenly becomes an argument about whether or not you like Vaush's content or Vaush as a person, as opposed to his ideas. People who like Vaush will die on the hill of defending his honor online, whilst people who don't like him will sook for fuckin aaaaaaages about how Vaush is worse than Hitler and literally kills Venezuelan babies. It's unproductive, it's annoying, it's boring, it's stale, just stop it. Me saying “just stop it” won't make it stop, but it makes me feel better about the whole thing.
How are we supposed to discuss Vaush's political beliefs when the discussion always turns to whether or not Vaush is either a saint or the incarnation of the dark lord Lucifer?
This dogmatic defence of an individual as a person instead of, say, their ideas, is something that socialists have problems with. They do the same with long-dead revolutionaries and writers: if you say something critical about their favorite one, they take it as a personal attack, or an attack against socialism as a political ideology. I'm allowed to not like revolutionaries and still be a socialist, guys. The point is to discuss the politics, not so much the people. Unfortunately this piece is the exact opposite of that. People will bravely defend Lenin or Stalin's honor online, without considering the fact that they've been dead for god-knows-how-long and nobody really cares about what they were like as people.
Vaush is bombastic, some may even say he's a firebrand, but his behavior is mildly agitating and somewhat concerning. Mr. Vaush and the people in his circle (I'll get to them later) tend to overuse the word “tankie”, which at this point is a meaningless jab that only reveals which internet person you get all of your ideas from. Generally, people who get called a “tankie” range from Marxist-Leninists voicing somewhat reasonable ideas, to the most deranged Dengist (i.e a REVISIONIST), to even people who just don't like Mr. Vaush for whatever reason. Pretty sure I've been called a tankie once, fun times.
“The Left”, as we know it anyway, is divided on the internet because vaguely politically-aware internet users cling to their Internet Person of choice and their esoteric set of ideas, picking that as a hill to die on. You will begin to see that for the most part, “Left Unity” has existed In Real Life for about two centuries, and not much is going to stop that.
Vaush describes what he's doing as “building a movement”, which I will address later, because GOOD GOD I need time to breathe first.
On the Market “Socialism” thing: I honestly feel like “market socialism” is only becoming more popular because of Vaush. I get the whole Tito in the 60s and 70s thing, but what Vaush advocates for seems specific to a modern time, and his constant reliance on worker cooperatives is a bit annoying. Worker cooperatives are not inherently socialist, contrary to the misconception. Mondragon, which many supporters of cooperatives point to, was promoted by the fascist Franco regime, and its founder, one José María Arizmendiarrieta, received a medal from Franco himself. Worker cooperatives are effective, yes, but are they inherently socialist? No. Another point I should make is that worker cooperatives don't make themselves. Does Vaush expect us to sit around and wait for worker cooperatives to magically and spontaneously come into being? He hasn't talked much about going out and forming them, to my knowledge. Cooperatives also have a... tenuous relationship with unions.
Cooperatives are also not “worker control” over the means of production. It's indirect control at best: workers still have managers, they just get to elect them, which is better than nothing but hardly “control”. I can “elect” a local councilor but that doesn't mean I “control” my local council.
Conclusion: Vaush is agitating to say the least, not particularly disappointing, but his contribution to internet d i s c o u r s e is... tenuous, at best. People from the Destinyverse (Vaush included) tend to mostly be exclusionary, counter-productive, retain awful gamer habits, and for some reason tend to be nicer to rightwingers than to “The Left”. Also, “market socialism” is annoying, speaking to “market socialists” tends to be irritating, just read Lenin or something idk.
The Good, The Xan and the Ugly
Xanderhal (source: wikituba)
Xanderhal (previously known as Pig Puncher, nice) is a more recent addition to the pantheon of weird internet people, and probably the youngest too. He was once a gamer, as they all were, and fell down the “alt-right pipeline”, something he made a video on. That was actually the first video of his I saw, many months ago, while hunched at my desk murdering people in Mount and Blade: Warband. Fun times.
For a long time, Xanderhal called himself an anarchist. Now, as someone who can accurately be described as “anarchist”, that interested me. That was, until I realized that he didn't know what anarchism was and probably just thought the word sounded cool. Now, there's no harm in not being informed, but not putting in the effort to learn when you can is just lazy. Xanderhal is a social democrat, as can be evidenced by, well, the things he says (see below), and was quite clearly never an anarchist to begin with.
The behavior that Xanderhal demonstrated was that of a stubborn, arrogant person. True arrogance is pretending to be in a position to educate other people about a political system you not only don't know the first thing about, but have no interest in learning more about either.
If I had to criticize Handerxal for anything else, it would also be the tankie thing. Flagrantly throwing the word “tankie” around at people you don't like is infantile. It's made the word pointless. Hell, people call themselves “tankies” proudly now. It gives off the wrong impression. It's strange how these people who claim to care so much about “optics” only do so to put down other leftists.
Xanderhal also proudly calls himself a “debate bro”, something that is used derogatorily to refer to Vaush, Destiny, etc. It is a further display of stubbornness, the kind you can only find among Weird Internet People. Xanderhal also makes a crucial mistake Vaush does, which I will address later on, because I Need To Breathe.
Behold – a rapid fire!
The Serfs
The Serfs is the best of a bad situation.
DemonMama
Better than Vaush, I guess?
ChudLogic
Not too bad.
SheepInTheBox
He's alright.
PhilosophyTube
Good stuff.
LonerBox
I am contractually obliged to say that the Loner Man is good.
ProfessorFlowers
Very interesting.
The Kavernacle
Nice voice.
Tom Tanuki
My king.
ThoughtSlime
The Dark Lord Oculon demands I say that the Slimer is good.
Shaun
My spirit animal.
Riley Grace Roshong
Now, Riley Grace Roshong is far from a “leftist”, but recent d i s c o u r s e has her visage floating around in my fried brain, so I must sook about her too for a while. The recent d i s c o u r s e which is ongoing was about “eat the rich”, a harmless slogan, which RGR denounced as being “a dogwhistle for mass murder”, I shit you not. It turns out Riley Grace Roshong didn't realize that socialists do in fact believe in socialism.
Riley is a liberal. A centrist, you could say. She's a streamer, some law student or something, and is another one of those content creators who pretends to be a political activist, quite like Destiny, or the V Man. What happened with RGR is a clear reminder that internet content creators aren't “activists”, they're, big shocker here, content creators, operating on a platform, where clicks and subscriber counts are king (or queen, or general secretary depending on who you talk to).
This “eat the rich” d i s c o u r s e is nothing more than a cynical attempt by RGR to gain followers from Destiny's “community”, so that she could profit more from the increased viewership from comfy centrists who find realpolitik to be too hard for their weak, spineless selves. RGR won't be open about this, of course, none of them will, but that is what is happening right now.
Liberals are not “leftwing”, and never have been. As an Australian, I don't have this stupid misconception of Liberals somehow being “allies” in the struggle for political and economic equality. THEY AREN'T. They BENEFIT from this inequality. They just want more diverse oppressors. Riley Grace Roshong is arrogant for stating that we can get what we want through Liberalism, as if Liberalism isn't what got us in this fucking mess in the first place.
Yeah, just pour gasoline into the fire, at least we're doing something you dumb stupid lefties!!!
Also, RGR blocked me instead of engaging with what was at the time a more mild mannered criticism. She seems to have a habit of embarrassing herself on twitter and then blocking anyone who says anything slightly critical of her. Should've seen that coming.
Stating the Obvious
“BreadTube”, “LeftTube” and everything else is just content creation cynically disguised as political activism. When Vaush shouts at a fifteen year old, it isn't seen as a grown man shouting at a child (as it should be), but as “antifascist activism”. When Xanderhal kisses Lauren Southern's feet on stream, that's not Xanderhal spinelessly engaging with Miss Genocider, that's “deradicalization”. When RGR cynically pivots into the Destinyverse, it's seen as a legitimate political act, when in reality, it's a marketing stunt, no different to when corporations do “good things” for good PR.
You don't build a political movement by posting online, son. No amount of “PSYCHO TANKIE DESTROYED BY FACTS AND LOGIC #69” is going to make the world less shit. I post online a lot, sure, but I also don't pretend to be some political messiah at the head of a political movement either. I don't pretend to be something I'm not, something that “BreadTube” is too keen to do, because it gets them clicks. Poor sods then end up contributing to the Patreon funds of content creators who earn way more than they could possibly dream of, thinking that they're contributing to some big political movement, deradicalization program or a liberal-to-leftist pipeline, when in reality they're just contributing to the hapless viewer to content creator's bank account pipeline.
If you want to donate to something legitimate, donate to the People v. Dutton legal fund. Peter Dutton, that shrill fuck, is unfairly suing refugee activist Shane Bazzi for “defamation”, because Bazzi had the courage to call Dutton out on his shit behavior. If you can, please chip in, because this will legitimately do some good in the world. If not for me, do it for the kids stuck in cruel internment camps off-shore.
You don't build a political movement by making youtube videos. It can help, sure, but it isn't the be all end all. You need to go outside, meet people, talk to the public, establish some infrastructure, to build a movement. I hope you all get around to doing that. I will, I can assure you that.
The end of this piece might've come off as a bit angry, but my brain is fried, I haven't had a healthy sleep habit lately (the Dengists are keeping me awake), so I wrote what came to mind. Do your best to read the whole thing before you make any comments. The key phrase is: Jack Mundey. If I don't hear the key phrase, I'll assume you haven't read the piece. Going through an arsehole arc right now.
Book Rec
This week's book rec is Green Bans Red Union, which can be found here. Good stuff about Mundey, the BLF, the Green bans and more.
Dare to struggle, dare to win!