A short fictional story, set roughly ten years into the future

I.

Like many people of my age in modern day America, I have three jobs. Or four I guess, depending how you look at it. I have a Youtube channel that’s reasonably succesful, I set up some ad campaigns for local companies, I do customer support for a prediction market and like most people who work there I earn some money on the side by betting against our own customers.

I’ll need to explain that. Everyone can create his own prediction on our blockchain, allowing people to bet on the outcome. Smart people create complex financial products to offset their risks. Even smarter people use this system to invest in companies before their Initial Public Offering. Dumb people use it to predict who will win Dancing with the Stars. Then they forget to remove their own open bids on the outcome, once the outcome is almost certain. That’s easy money for me to pick up.

So, like many companies, we try to attract as many dumb people as you can imagine. It’s easy to make a buck off dumb people, whereas smart people make a buck off you. It doesn’t matter how stupid something is, dumb people can be convinced they need it in their lives. Even today, people still buy “feminine hygiene products for internal use”, despite the fact that these products disrupt the fragile balance of beneficial bacteria and merely leave you emitting an unpleasant odor.

When you become an entrepreneur, you don’t start out thinking you can scam dumb people. It just happens. You develop a product and think humanity will benefit. Eventually you grow disillusioned by your own product, but now you have fifteen employees, a wife and a mortgage, so you put it out of your mind. It doesn’t matter whether people are paying twice as much money for gold-plated cables that deliver the exact same sound quality to their speakers. You need to eat.

II.

I figured that one out too. I have a Youtube channel, where I make videos about climate change. Due to some college classes in statistics I can prove to people beyond reasonable doubt that a particular hurricane or drought is linked to climate change. They watch those videos and share them with their older family members so they can say “told you so”, whenever a Californian suburb burns down or a hurricane annihilates a retirement town in Florida. I have a reasonably consistent audience, it largely overlaps with the kind of people who watch the David Pakman show and listen to Chapo Trap House.

But sometimes I make a mistake. Rule number one on Youtube is: Don’t alienate your audience. If youtube recommends a video, people need to click it. If people click a video, people need to spend a lot of time watching it. If you fail either of those two rules, your video won’t be recommended. You can spam it on Reddit, Facebook and other sites, but that won’t compensate for the fact that you screwed up. And I screwed up.

I made a video a few weeks ago, suggesting that climate change will lead to increasing waves of mass migration of people from third world countries to Western countries. I argued that this is unsustainable, that migration leads to an increase in the carbon footprint of the refugees and that the emphasis should be on helping refugees in their countries of origin, where they are internally displaced as this is more cost-effective and ultimately more sustainable.

I don’t think the channel will recover from that. I found the video received slightly more downvotes than upvotes. “Racist garbage, unsubscribed.” One comment said. “We need bridges, not walls.” Another argued. I also encountered some people I never tend to see. “Don’t forget who started this HOAX to flood EVERY white country with third world peasants! They want a 90 IQ slave population that’s obedient and easy to rule over! Read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!” A guy argued.

I had suddenly attracted a new audience, that left me feeling a little embarrassed. Within the next few videos I found they started to disappear again, but the old audience wasn’t returning either. I still got the occasional comment arguing that the sun is having far more sunspots than it used to have but that by 2033 we will start to enter a new Ice Age because planet X will crash into Venus, with a link to a Daily Mail article. This led to some debates between my old audience and the new audience, but the views did not recover. The few serious blogs that still linked to me apologized for the comments and I got a PM telling me I should just turn off the comments to save the channel.

III.

I was afraid of having the same thing happen to the various clients I worked with, so I made sure to avoid repeating that mistake. A guy showed up in my mailbox who wants to promote his Youtube video on Facebook that explains how to raise your testosterone. We want to attract people who have a lot of money and we want to avoid people who will piss everyone else off.

I started out by not showing the video to anyone who likes Donald Trump or Paul Joseph Watson on Facebook. That seemed to do the trick. I still noticed the occasional comment arguing that Tea extracts are high in fluoride and you should buy Super Male Vitality instead, but by manually downvoting those and upvoting anyone who praised us we pretty much fixed the problem.

I essentially gave up on my own channel and decided to focus more on earning money by helping others avoid repeating my mistakes. I compared my results in different campaigns and concluded that Youtube essentially clusters young adult caucasian men into three different broad categories. I jokingly referred to them as The Saints, The Geniuses and the Alpha-males. These are superclusters, collections of various specific related niches, almost every young adult caucasian man can fit within one of these three.

Fit your material into any of these three broad categories and you can rest assured that Youtube will show it to people who won’t be offended or alienated by it. You need an attention grabbing headline that features their vernacular and they’ll click on it. Show them something that challenges their own views and you’ll alienate them, offend them and the algorithms will punish you.

What I find important to point out is that many people who see videos that disagree with their own ideas don’t hate those videos and don’t punish you for creating them. Look at it from this perspective however: There’s a video pointing out to the Saints that solar panels will be insufficient to transition the whole world to renewable energy. It argues that nuclear energy is the most effective candidate for baseload capacity. It receives 80% thumbs up and most of the people finish the whole video.

However, why should Youtube bother showing it to them, if there’s another video that receives 90% thumbs up? If you alienate even a small minority of viewers, those people shut down Youtube and go back to browsing Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Youtube ideally wants to show videos that everyone who watches them likes. Those are videos that confirm their views.

IV.

So after figuring this out, besides doing marketing I started doing consulting. I had a right-wing libertarian guy, who wanted to make a video explaining how Jews win so many Nobel Prizes and that Nazi Germany might have won the second world war if it did not persecute Jews. I told him that this is a bad idea. His audience is divided in its views on Jewish people. He should focus on making a video about something that angers everyone. He argued to me that he’s frightened by some of his own audience, that he wants to help them get a more balanced perspective. I told him that if he wants to deliver a public service he’s free to do so, but he should start looking for another job after publishing it.

I sent him a link to an article about a bearded Muslim in Italy, who wandered through the streets juggling the heads of three decapitated cats. Soon he uploaded a video where his big red sweaty face was ranting and raving about Muslims, cucks and feminists, he even managed to get some saliva on his camera in the middle of his temper tantrum that he never wiped off. Everyone loved it. He told nobody anything new, or anything they might disagree with. Everyone who watches the channel dislikes Muslims, but the reasons for the dislike of Muslims differ. Some of his audience thinks Muslims are genetically predisposed to mass murder, others think Islam is a setback for gay rights. As long as he doesn’t zoom in on what he specifically dislikes about Muslims, he doesn’t alienate anybody.

I negotiated a deal with the guy. I wanted 10% of his income to keep working for him. I promised him I had something good. I would turn him into a celebrity. He would be up there in his niche with Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson. Every angry white male on the planet would love him. He agreed. I looked up a fetish forum, for women who like to be humiliated. I found an overweight young woman, I told her I would get her what she’s into. I told her to dye her hair blue, took her to my local college campus, got her to sit down in a chair that was too small for her and got a buddy to record her.

Of course she couldn’t get up again, the chair was stuck to her body. I tried to help her to get out, but I did an intentionally poor job. My buddy who was recording couldn’t help but be amused. I walked up to him and shouted “shut up sexist, go bodyshame someone else”. Eventually some local girls from the women’s studies class helped her out and I had to give my buddy the sign to stop recording.

“LIBERAL CUCK IS TOO WEAK TO HELP HIS FEMINIST LANDWHALE GET OUT OF HER CHAIR” Was the Youtube headline I woke up to. Two million views, overnight. I didn’t regret it. I was set. We drew in millions of new people. They were reaching the age where PewDiePie could not satiate their intellect anymore, so when they visited my client’s channel they watched videos making fun of blue-haired feminists, with explanations on how Bisphenol A makes you fat and soy turns you into a Beta male.

V.

I realized we were not the only ones who learned the trick. “Don’t alienate anyone” Is the key to economic success. You can’t profit by being a heterodox iconoclast. Don’t try to be a modern day Christopher Lasch or Jacques Ellul. Your audience will be too small and you won’t break even. So, I looked at Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson again and realized they figured it out long ago.

If you talk about how the Georgia Guidestones warn that everyone will be killed with genetically engineered bioweapons, you’ll alienate a portion of your audience. If on the other hand, you merely warn that Global Warming is a UN Hoax that’s used to raise our taxes, you won’t alienate anyone. Mild xenophobia, mild conspiracism, mild patriotism and a mild macho-man cultus. That’s how you avoid alienating anyone in your audience. You want the guy with a Jewish grandfather to avoid feeling left out, you want the guy who is not an American avoid being bored by your rants about what a brave man Andrew Jackson was.

More importantly of course, you want to avoid sending the wrong tribal signal. Some of your audience thinks the Holocaust is a hoax, if you take any position on it yourself, you’re guaranteed to alienate some people. Some of your audience thinks the Earth is 6000 years old and Jesus will be coming back once we all get sent to the Fema camp. Again, don’t mention your views on it, because agreeing or disagreeing will both work to alienate a portion of your audience. It’s the same with cannabis, half your audience uses it, the other half thinks it’s degenerate and sold by Jews to keep us sedated.

You should occasionally pay some lip service to the portions of your audience that cares deeply about this sort of stuff. Abortion is bad and women don’t watch your channel anyway, so the men who are not conservative Christians are simply indifferent to abortion. Complain about all the abortions in America every once in a while and your Christian audience is happy, don’t get into the specifics to avoid alienating the young libertarian men who see themselves as proud atheists. It’s an easy job, once you figure out what you’re supposed to do.

VI.

But the Internet doesn’t stay on the Internet. I told you that I have another job, a real job where I work for a boss and do customer support for a prediction market. Although I mostly work from home, once every month I have to attend some meeting. That’s where I figured out that my young white male colleagues can be fit into one of the three young white male Youtube superclusters too.

My first colleague made a joke about how parents who don’t vaccinate their children against polio will say “at least he doesn’t have autism” when their child is in a wheelchair. I first thought to myself that this is stupid, because acute flacid paralysis still occurs and it’s essentially the same thing as Polio. I then reminded myself that even when you’re infected with the Polio virus as a child, there’s less than a 1% chance of long-term complications. I figured out he’s clearly one of the Geniuses. He spends a lot of time on Reddit, particularly /r/futurology and /r/science. He likes the “I fucking love Science” page on Facebook.

I thought to myself: “What does he think about nuclear energy?” He probably wants us to start building new nuclear reactors. He will argue that the Fukushima disaster happened on a fault line and thus is clearly not representative of the rest of the world and the radiation that was released actually reduces cancer deaths due to hormesis. I don’t agree with any of that stuff, but I know what sort of information he must expose himself to. I decided to gently nudge the topic in that direction.

“I wonder if Cathy wasn’t breastfed as a child, or whether she merely ate so much radioactive Chinese seaweed that she turned into an overweight blob.” I joked, after my right-wing libertarian colleague complained about our female manager. I knew I could get away with this unfunny cruel joke, because we didn’t have any Saints in the room, just one or two Geniuses and a lot of Alpha Males. It was a very forced way to trigger a rant from one of the Geniuses.

Before I knew he took the bait. “Well, to be fair, coal production in China does release an awful lot of radiation, far more than the Fukushima disaster ever did. The positive externalities from a tax on carbon would be significant.” I was close. I don’t browse his subreddits on a daily basis and he might have watched a Youtube video that I had skipped over.

VII.

The two geniuses eventually received promotion and stopped attending our monthly meetings. They would only pick up the phone from now on if any of us were sick, they spent the rest of their days coding. This left me with a room full of alpha-males. These guys regularly went to the gym, watched videos from Pick Up Artists and took herbal supplements they heard about on the Alex Jones show. Testosterone levels in the room shot through the roof. Whenever we got together and the guys had a couple of beers, the jokes would start about cucks and liberals getting BTFO, Trump playing fifty-dimensional chess and Jordan Peterson finally being redpilled on the J-q.

I felt a little uncomfortable, because these did not seem like authentic human beings anymore. When you spend every evening, letting your brain be shaped by a bunch of complex computer algorithms designed to maximize the profits of a fortune 500 company, are you still an individual? Do governments have an obligation to reign in these algorithms? I didn’t know. The thought of the government deciding what I can and can’t watch somehow seemed even more frightening to me than a computer algorithm figuring out what people like to watch on their laptop.

I did decide however, that I didn’t want to fit into an easy box. I panicked one day, when I figured out that I was becoming a simpleton. A mix of a genius and an alpha-male, drifting more towards the genius supercluster, as I slowly changed my mind on nuclear energy and water fluoridation, under the influence of the videos of a client I worked for. I found myself looking for Soylent on the Internet and wanted to try taking Modafinil to improve my performance at work, because there really didn’t seem to be any negative side-effects to this to me. “This has to stop!” I thought to myself. But it won’t stop, until I put an end to it.

VII.

How do I escape the superclusters? I can fool the algorithm into thinking I’m not a young white male native English speaker. If I watch two hundred make-up videos in a row, will I get videos about men on public transport who try to squeeze your ass? That did not seem like an improvement to me. I decided to learn a foreign language. I downloaded Duolingo and began to brush up on my French skills. I could always speak some very basic French, but I wanted to spend my evening shifts at work watching French videos rather than English ones. I wanted to learn what the other superclusters have to offer to me.

And it worked. I made sure not to watch as much as a single English language video while logged in on my own account. I listened to French black metal, I watched videos about paintings at the Louvre, bought books on Amazon from French existentialists and read on Facebook about the theology of Jacques Ellul. Because I’m not French myself, my knowledge of French culture is limited to a random collection of some of its most popular export products. As a result, even if the algorithms decide that I’m French instead of American, they still don’t quite comprehend what box I happen to fit into.

After a while, when I stopped watching videos about paintings they seemed to be pretty convinced that I’m male. I wasn’t part of the radical left, because I had a big interest in French culture and never watched any rap videos. I must be some sort of right-winger. But what sort of right-winger? I got strange videos from French traditionalist Catholics rambling about the Siri thesis, as well as occasional Pepe the frog jokes from nerdy boys who insisted that staring a woman into her eyes for twenty seconds without looking away makes her desperate to sleep with you. Facebook thought I was a middle-aged married man with an extramarital affair, Youtube seemed to think that I’m an insecure teenager.

VIII.

I didn’t fit in anywhere anymore, so I found myself exposed to a wealth of information I would have missed out on otherwise. I watched book reviews by nerdy guys with ponytails, about Renaissance occult literature. A young teenage girl in her parents attic made a convincing case that rural Normandy had evidence of a genuine witch cult in the late 18th century. As I watched less videos by “Geniuses”, guys in Sillicon Valley with low testosterone due to an inactive lifestyle, vitamin D deficiency and a hyper-rationalist outlook on life, I found my own view of the world changing dramatically. I didn’t consider my mind a product of physical matter anymore. I began to look at matter the way William Blake does: A cold portion of soul discerned by the five senses.

As my worldview changed so radically from that of every other young American white man, I developed interests that most of them don’t have. I didn’t stare women in the eyes for twenty seconds, I consulted an astrologer to determine whether I should ask a friend out or not. I slowly stopped visiting the gym, because I didn’t see enough motivational videos on Youtube that helped me fulfill my goals for the New Year. Instead I bought a telescope and a bat-detector. Young American men normally don’t go out into the woods at night, to record species of bat flying by and making ultrasonic sounds. I do, because my algorithms differ. Young American men don’t watch Swedish language Roy Anderson movies. I do.

It’s an alienating experience, to be different. I find myself no longer having opinions on vaccination, on feminism, on refugees, on Trump, on the Mattress girl, on soy, on nuclear energy or on transgenderism, because I never think about any of that. I think about why Madame Bovary was so unhappy in her marriage, or why Jacques Ellul thought of the city as the ultimate expression of man’s rejection of God.

I’m now so different from my colleagues that I don’t seem to offend them anymore. They don’t get angry anymore, they just ignore me when I say something. I’m now almost entirely alone, with two close friends and five vague acquaintences I meet up with twice a year. I stay out of the political arguments between my mother and my brother when I’m present in the same room with them during the holidays. I know their superclusters differ.

IX.

But all around me, society began to fall apart. At the office we hired a girl who was genuinely competent, but she was fired within two months when she insisted one of the guy’s jokes crosses a line. Not much later, Cathy claimed to suffer burnout symptoms and stopped showing up. People began to migrate, because they had to look for groups of people they would fit in with. Elderly Americans desperate for jobs because they could not survive off their social security payments migrated to a new Amazon warehouse near my town. At some point, they literaly rioted and nearly burned down the whole building when they received a card from their management in San Francisco that said “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas”.

The thing you have to understand however is as following: The man who was arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail into the building is not a Christian. He’s a Jew. He doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but being friends with Christian men and women left him exposed to the same information as them. At some point he felt so angry about the undermining of America’s founding Judeo-Christian values that he became willing to ruin his life out of solidarity with them. He was accused of attempted murder but set free as the jury unanimously declared he’s innocent. He was hailed as a hero of course by his colleagues, but I found myself looking at a country that no longer functions.

Enormous rifts had grown in the country. Siblings refused to speak to each other, because they could not agree on whether homosexual men should be allowed to adopt autistic mute boys. The latest government shutdown had persisted for three years now, with no end in sight. People had become afraid of speaking their minds. But more importantly, they began to struggle to understand each other. “Based Jew cucks liberal land-whale-lovers” I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at, I had to read it three times. Is this video endorsing the Jewish man who threw a molotov cocktail, or is the title meant ironically? I knew my colleagues would have no issue understanding it.

“[TW]North problematizes women’s body image” Now I found myself genuinely struggling to understand what I was reading. North is a direction on the compass to me, but after clicking the video I figured out that the targeted audience consists of young feminist women who are so up to date with the latest adventures of the Kardashian family that North now refers to a person. If you spend every day isolated from each other, you lose the ability to communicate. Millions of people work from home, millions more now study from home.

The company I work for now only employs men. I got complaints the other day that I never fart or burp during a meeting. Occasionally the guys share porn videos in the company channel. The travel agency my female friend works at consists of seven young white women her age, managed by a wealthy middle-aged male boss. There’s a broken weighing scale hanging on the wall. Whenever one of the girls is feeling stressed out, she grabs a hammer and punches it.

X.

My family is Dutch in origin. My great-grandparents left the Netherlands after the end of world war II and settled in the United States. I occasionally open a book, to learn about my heritage. In the beginning of the 20th century, before the emergence of mass media and public television channels, the Netherlands was home to various dialects. The Dutch nobility had its own language and manners. Most Dutch people said “eet smakelijk” before starting their meal. The nobility didn’t. The regular people call a toilet a toilet. The nobility would call it a “plee”. Because the nobility inherited their wealth and status, they felt like showing off the fact that they don’t need to have good manners. They literally emulated the lifestyle of the Dutch working poor.

Another dialect we had was Bargoens. This was influenced by Yiddish, as well as some words from Romani languages and terms from the Dutch underclass. Bargoens was a language used by thieves and outlaws. It was meant to be incomprehensible to those outside of the demographic that used it. If you don’t comprehend what people say, you’ll struggle to understand whether they’re violating the law.

If you don’t comprehend what your ideological opponents mean, you can’t debunk their arguments. If you don’t even use arguments, but appeal to their emotions, there is no contradiction possible whatsoever. “The average American is being ignored by Washington” This appeals to certain people. But how do you argue against it? It’s an emotion people feel and subjective experiences are impossible to debate. So, when a woman feels shamed when the XXL T-shirt she wants to buy online is more expensive than an M, how do you argue against it? You can’t. The clothing store was targeted by a boycott campaign from which it never recovered.

As the months have passed, I have started to regret unclustering myself. It’s an isolating experience. They can’t think of a box to fit me in, but everyone is now just convinced that I feel better than them. I saw a black feminist complain the other day about “white boys who insist on playing devil’s advocate” and I realized she was talking about my argument to her that Trump arguably had a proper reason to renegotiate the Paris climate agreement, as India and some other nations didn’t make any genuine commitments. It wasn’t really possible in my society to have real debates between opposing views any longer. You had to signal the group you belong to and make sure not to send the wrong signals.

XI.

I was fired not so long ago. I argued that we should close a particular prediction market because it seemed to incentivize the assasination of New York’s governor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, without explicitly calling for her death. “It’s not your gig to keep right-wing SJW’s from violating the NAP!” My boss commented in our public channel. Soon I received a flood of complaints from all sorts of incidents I had forgotten about, where I disagreed with the majority. I realized that people didn’t tolerate it after all. The anger just built, but nobody felt comfortable being the first to express it. The Francophonie has a tradition of a stronger government and big corporations are more expected to function as benevolent stewards, rather than as blind profit-seeking entities. Had I set up my own demise?

The “geniuses” meanwhile, the hyperrationalist transhumanist leaning libertarian atheists who insist on staying out of the culture wars and simply hoping that technology will allow them to flee to Mars one day, had started to reshape their identity around being as inoffensive as possible. If you’re part of the tech elite and don’t want to be lynched by an angry mob because you complimented your intern on her dress or sent out an email saying “happy holidays” to people over sixty, you learn to avoid saying certain things and learn how to avoid certain subjects.

When one of your nerdy coworkers wonders at the dinner table why most chess grandmasters are men, you suddenly start talking about Rocco’s basilisk. From a rational perspective, a Genius realizes that avoiding the risk of social ostracism or internal arguments should be one of his main priorities. I often read on Wikipedia about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other tech moguls and realize by reading between the lines that these men know a lot of things they’re now afraid of talking about.

XII.

We now all live one social media outrage away from social ostracism. For 20,000 dollar worth of Monero you can buy a video on the darkweb that features your boss using the “N-word”. For 50,000 dollar, a woman will insist that she had her bum squeezed twenty years ago on the metro by a politician. I made an anonymous bet on the prediction market of my former employer that Sam Fernandez, a senator, would not seek reelection and drop out of the race. I then bought a video where a woman accuses him of sexual assault. I spent 30,000 dollar on the video (I got a discount), bet 5,000 dollar on the guy dropping out and made 50,000 when I won my bet. I think this is how I will now start making a living.

People have become difficult to tell apart. Ann Coulter and Alex Jones used to hate each other, but the algorithms made them friends. She accused him of believing in black helicopters and he accused her of being a sellout, but the hatchet has been buried. Why would they fight each other, when neither party genuinely stands to gain? You want to hover in the center of your cluster, you want to be an archetype of the kind of person your audience identifies as, or otherwise as the kind of person they’re attracted to. The “Alpha males” figured this out and now use the term “no enemies on the right”.

There are Saints, who complain every day about black men who are stopped in traffic by the police. They occasionally complain about climate change, but they make sure at all times to refer to it as an outgrowth of capitalism that is caused by a couple of Fortune 500 companies and can be stopped by implementing socialism. They never suggest that you and me are to blame. They never suggest that you should become vegan, because overweight women will downvote their video and accuse them of body-shaming. They never suggest that you should stop flying, because they don’t want to alienate their viewers.

What I notice now is that no problem ever gets solved. There is a half-finished wall on the Mexican border, because the next president after Trump put a stop to its construction. It works well to drive animal populations into extinction, it fails to stop Mexican drug cartels from exporting fentanyl. Obesity has become a nation-wide epidemic, but doctors are afraid of warning their patients of the health risks. The federal government is shut down more often than not.

Families have been torn apart, relationships now occur along political lines. Lonely women now pretend to believe in things they don’t believe in, to attract wealthy men. There’s a woman at my local coffee shop, frequented by wealthy IT guys, who insists on paying with Bitcoin for her coffee. It takes her fifteen minutes every day before she manages to get it working. More often than not, one of the guys stands up, walks over to her and helps her out. It ends with them exchanging numbers. I’ve seen her do this multiple times now. The employees at the store sigh and roll their eyes whenever she walk in.

XIII.

I have started to self-censor. I’m trying to unlearn all that I have learned. I want to be blind to the clusters. I want to be accepted into a tribe. I started lifting weights. I’m still in an informal group chat app with my colleagues that we used for insider-trading discussions. I bought the same herbal supplement from Alex Jones as all my colleagues. It’s true that you are what you eat, I found my own thoughts resonating with theirs. I see a video of a guy who fails to carry his girlfriend down the stairs and I laugh with them.

I speak a dialect that makes you cringe. My hobbies are boring, there is not an original thought that enters into my mind. But I’m at peace and I’m appreciated. I’m being asked to come back. I must admit to you, that I don’t really have another option. I’ve been living comfortably, off of the 10% I earned from my friend, who became a viral internet celebrity. If I gave you his name, you’d instantly recognize him. Even babyboomers in the autumn of their lives know who he is.

One day, as I noticed that the monthly check into my bank account seemed unusually low, I decided to look him up. I saw that he snapped. “Ten tips from a vegan bodybuilder!” “Israeli prime minister warns German president about mass migration!” “How to cook a high-protein meal with Huitlacoche!” That’s it. It’s over. Too much iconoclasm for your career to recover from. The algorithms are confused. There are left-wing men showing up in his comment section, Hispanic women link to his videos. His like/dislike ratio has moved outside of the desired range.

He’s a college dropout, who figured out one day that this Youtube thing might become very big. He had been working on this for years while living with his parents. He never really made a dime, until he met me. I guess he had more integrity than me. I saw him the other day on Youtube, in someone else’s video. He was delivering food to some guy’s house. “Beta goy wagecucks for deliveroo after shilling for shekels” The people who loved him laugh at him, they joked about how weak he looks now that he can’t afford his bodybuilding supplements. I think he is the bigger man.