The random train of thought that ultimately led to these words being here right now.

I think I first had the truly invasive “dude, get a blog” thought pretty recently. Oh sure, it’s always been a potential avenue of brain-offloading – I’ve had the standard “teen nonsense blasted onto Facebook” phase (or was it MySpace? It was… somewhere. You can probably find it if you cared to look. I didn’t specifically delete it and I know these tech monolith corporations just hold onto any and every scrap of personal data they can sponge up.)

Oh, and get used to that, digressions are my love language. Especially on posts in the newly minted “Ramblin'” category. You, poor reader, are in for a ride.

Aaaaanyway, back to the how-slash-why of how I ended up here.

So back then, the “last straw” was, I believe, an extended incoherent self-discussion on the nature of content creation and I guess the ethics of specifically YouTube types that are able to make content that I personally might find interesting, but am put off from for various capitalism related reasons.

I didn’t keep any notes or anything, but I still remember the key points.

(And before I dive in proper, yes, I *am* jealous of content creators’ success. Who wouldn’t be? At least I admit it.)

So essentially, it’s the phenomenon of someone taking a chance at making interesting content, it works out for them, and then for a while things are just fine. They find a stable equilibrium and can continue making decent content.

The problem is the 1%-ers. I could name any of the really big popular names on YouTube, and you’ll typically get a similar story. Content starts off interesting, then once the popularity comes in, the pandering and whoring out begin. It stops being about the content, and like… kind of about itself? They might still make videos about whatever topic they started out with, but something’s off. It’s maybe just a bit too… unreal. They’ve moved out of the (already actually pretty decent) little room, and they have an actual little office. More often than not, slathered in those ubiquitous “capital G Gamer” god-awful LED light strips and those chairs that belong in a car.

And that’s the tragedy. I might want to keep watching, but now I’m keenly aware that there’s a steep class divide. This person got lucky. Extremely, unreasonably lucky. That’s not to say they’re not working hard at getting to that stage in the first place, but if you consider how any Joe Average can upload whatever they like at any time, the volume of users trying to break out in the field of content creation is significant. Precious few reach that “kind of sustaining themself” stage, so to get truly “popular” popular, there’s a lot of random chance.

And no matter how hard they try, it’s impossible for them to just keep quiet about their good fortunes. It’s always the nicer office with the shitty lighting. It’s the rare opportunities that, by nature of having become popular already, are not available to us mere mortals. It’s having the freedom to drop whatever they’re doing at a moment’s notice to bugger off around the world and go see cool stuff… and then make a video about this awesome vacation they’ve just been on and you’ll never be able to dream of.

It really is an elite and privileged position to be in, and nobody (that I’m aware of) has yet been able to reconcile that with maintaining the authentic version of themselves that got them there in the first place.

I guess it doesn’t matter… “I got mine, screw you”. As long as the content hose keep going at full blast. Give the peasants what they crave.

And I’m not going to claim it isn’t a lot of work… but it’s a lot of small, manageable tasks that are ultimately up to their whims anyway. No manager breathing down their neck, cancelling time off and “suggesting” you take a few hours of overtime to cover the next big project.

It’s all in their control… and to a degree, yes, they are trapped on the treadmill of constantly doing. But relative to the difficulty of the work, it’s unreasonably lucrative. And if they fail or miss deadlines, nobody really cares. There’s always an audience.

And frankly, many of them could comfortably afford to just not keep running on that treadmill. But they do, because the lifestyle they’re accustomed to – the luxury vacations, the rare sponsorships and perks related to their content, it’s all too good to pass up.

Okay, I’m tired of typing now. I think that seems largely coherent. If you made it this far… why?

(Oh, and if by some unlikely event I myself get fabulously rich… you can bet your ASS I’ll be following the same exact pattern. I’m a hypocrite… but I’ll be a rich hypocrite)