YouTube is Broadcast Television and Twitch is Cable. Does that sound about right? Am I close? I feel like that happened really fast. YouTube’s true audience is Unilever or whoever the fuck. Multinational Hydrae bound in circles of salt by public markets. Twitch is the warping House of Chaos that dances in fire. You have no idea what kind of angel or devil is going to splup out of some inky hole and currently - currently - that is a market advantage.

Having chiddlers is like having an ambulatory weathervane in your house that walks around and gets batted here and there by the ghostly winds of the larger culture. You can sense the larger currents very easily with the use of these precision devices, and you can make them at home.

A year ago, kids wanted to be YouTubers and now they want to be Ninja. I don’t really see a universe where this force moves backward. Twitch is where you go to have your optic nerve overridden by audiovisual sucrose. YouTube is now where you go to learn that your uncle is a racist.

Everything is rotting in real time, including things that are as much of an assumption as YouTube. It is vitally important that we remember a few things: When Penny Arcade started, there was no YouTube. Indeed, broadband was not common. Mobile browsing of the kind that makes up the bulk of today’s usage was science fiction. People have this idea that history is over; that’s just some place where dumb people without our profound intellect beat rocks together. In truth, there is no present at all; we live in the heat and pressure of the past grinding against the future.

(CW)TB out.