I Don't Care About the Lost Boys: Five Reasons Why The Kids Alienating Themselves Watching Streamers Is Not My Fault
On New Years at the 'kitchen-beer' Bedstuy function I attended a common question rung throughout the night: Whatever happened to Ryan Seacrest?
He's doing great, definitely. Kids don't watch daytime TV, so he's off in a cave somewhere. I do not know what they watch. When I was a kid, I watched Dunkey.
Adin Ross has the mind of a rabbit. Perhaps it's a put-on. Of course it's a put-on. But when I watch my daytime TV, Adin pals around with Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed and something silly will happen and I get real stoked. Affiliate marketers chop up bits of these videos to build narratives and I watch them and I laugh and laugh. Watching Kai cry a literal tear over a mouse being spotted in his bedroom live on stream - I laughed. I get it! I get it now! Watching Speed, playing Just Dance, destroy his VR setup once he's decided chart topper "One Kiss" by Dua and Calvin is a "girl song" I get it!
Like Tony on Peyote, I understand a little bit of what's going on!
Now, in the spirit of the Sopranos, imagine some likeable violent criminal hanging out with these guys, too. A real Ralphie figure, y'know? And he seems to be a good earner from what I've gathered from that self-snitching video Bruce Rivers put together.
Imagine Jeffery Epstein going on Ellen. Or Hilary Clinton on Howard Stern.
That's Andrew and Adin. Andrew Tate and Adin Ross.
Tech companies built the platforms and random kids rebuilt our media landscape. Tumblr, Newgrounds, Youtube, Pitch…fork… But at the end of the day, it's just Barbara Walters defending Hollyweird as Corey Haim describes all the awful stuff that happened to him as a kid. It's Andrew Cuomo galivanting in the hearts of minds of a million dogbrain libs while he kills the elderly and destroys New York's economy (it's fine now.) It's Obama and Joe [Redacted] because that's what I do! It's Adin Ross cosigning a guy who beat women into a webcam empire and bragged about tax fraud and sex crimes on Fresh and Fit.
And if you're watching like, Fresh and Fit… man, just take the L. Get a hobby.
Regardless, I'd rather watch Adin hang out with a violent pedophile than listen to anything Hasan or Vaush have to say. Hasan is absolutely compromised and his uncle is literally Cenk. Vaush is disgusting and he looks disgusting. The deal is, it's entertainment. When R Kelly entraps women into sex slavery, he does it while making incredible music. Hit after hit after hit. That's more entertaining then some hulking gamer doing homework live on Twitch. Sam Hyde (at one point a long time ago) was very funny. Reacting to Ben Shapiro clips is not funny. Sure, Adin or Tate inviting women who are functionally prostitutes (see I can be misogynist too) to argue about how all women are functionally prostitutes is barely entertaining, but it's content. And it's better than what Elliot Rodger did.
When Hasan keeps a kid indoors, behind a screen, clicking and guffawing at some slick Marxist zinger, that's an kid who could be organizing! When Tate or fucking Sneako keep a kid's head down at his Autozone job or something, that's a guy who won't have time to beat or eat women.
I'm being facetious. But it is crazy to watch the media make so much of somebody like Andrew Tate's messaging and its impact on 12 year old boys who have never been misogynist, ever, and never been negatively influenced by something in media, while he commits international sex crime. Because the former is something we let Jim Belushi and Tyler Perry do for decades and the latter is something they got rid of Jeff and Ghislaine for.
Anyway. Let's take a breath.
If I want to engage with revolutionary ideas I will read a book. I will not turn to the mincemeat one puts on while they do the dishes to confront the next steps for society. I spent years in college and on both coasts avoiding the Verso Books-reading crackheads that are apparently all over liberal arts college and all over Brooklyn and I don't intend to listen to dumber versions of that speak to even dumber people. By the metric of stupid online spaces, I am talking to idiots every-single-day at work. I am surrounded by people with disgusting politics. I work in Manhattan with the best and brightest thieves and money changers to ever exist. But they pay a good wage and I'm lazy.
Youtube essays are for 1 and a half hour long discussions of Fallout: New Vegas characters and DVD rips of fixed-gear freestyle videos. Read a book. It's easy. Go on Wikipedia and look at the references for a topic you find interesting. Go on IRChighway's ebooks channel and download them. Read them at the laundromat. Read them on the train. Read them on quiet afternoons when you've got nothing to do. But don't just let someone chop up ideas and spit em back at you, whether or not you agree with them.
Because it's fucking weird. Because you're a regular person and you cannot go through life quoting YouTube at people. This includes the undercurrent of these guys 'lost to the manosphere' - which has been around literally forever and has always clearly been boring. Sorry your idiot dad got divorced and adopted misogyny to deal with it. I don't care.
There is going to be a new generation of misogynists just like this one and the one before and the one before. These pods produce them, like Sean Connery interviews did before. And these weak little guys, when they face adversity, when women run away from them like they've filled their pants with shit, when the forex doesn't work and the crypto doesn't work and they don't just start a small business like a normal person, maybe they'll vote blue! Maybe they'll leave Miami and stop being whoremongers and stop hoarding wealth and try to take part in society like a normal person! Most likely they will not. Most likely they won't leave the Twin Cities or wherever and their family will stop inviting them to things. They will be alienated from women and black people and gays and they'll jog forward, alone, until an FBI agent entraps them into something or they get really into mountain bikes or they drive into a wall at 80mph.
And it's not Google's job to save these people. It's literally yours. It's your job. If you care so fucking much about it then let them know why they're wrong for that. You wrong fa that. Point out they don't get pussy, they can just get a business loan at the bank or learn a trade or something and they're not smart enough to get rich. Hustler's University seemed to feature both Pimpology and copywriting lessons. Unless this guy's like, on the jury for your rape trial, what is different about his podcast misogyny from any misogyny that's ever existed? How does it change the struggle?
I'm watching YouTube shorts of Family Guy. I watching Andrew Tate finally declare that Adin is a G and I'm happy, man. I get it.