who is "you" in a livestream?

the Perv Right will do anything but play settlers of catan

A few weeks ago, I was on Charlie Warzel’s podcast Galaxy Brain talking about Clavicular the looksmaxxer (how long ago it already seems that anyone cared!) and his colleague Nick Fuentes brought up the episode on his livestream later. As far as I know, Fuentes did not mention me personally, but instead took issue with Charlie’s opening monologue. Here’s what Fuentes said:

Millennials are playing Settlers of Catan with their girlfriends, drinking wine. And they’re giggling about this shit [Clavicular]. And some girl at this Settlers of Catan board game party is saying ‘I can’t believe I understood every word you just said, I need to touch grass….’ do you know what I’m talking about?

I saw this podcast from The Atlantic… and there’s this older millennial doing the podcast in his attic and he’s like ‘for those that haven’t heard about Clavicular, maybe that’s a good thing, I’m sorry I have to tell you’… as if you’re not a doomscroller? These people need to go into the gas chambers. I shouldn’t say that, but seriously. The women, too.

Fuentes probably searched his name to find the podcast, which only had about 20K views on YouTube. Or maybe he saw it in some Twitter quote-tweet, or one of the mouth-breathers in his Telegram chat sent it.

It is fascinating that the worst possible thing, in his mind, is to drink wine with your girlfriend who laughs at funny stuff from the internet and play Settlers of Catan because, although I don’t really like Settlers of Catan, isn’t that the good life? Isn’t that, or something like it, what we’re all hoping for? Why is attending a Settlers of Catan wine night worthy of a sentence to the gas chambers?

Maybe it’s because the wine night isn’t being streamed on Kick, which means you’re throwing money away. And maybe the romance between insane streamer and sad viewer is as potent as that of boyfriend and girlfriend, thereby in competition with romantic relationships, just as it is with every kind of real-life social bond.

But I want to talk about the “you” which Fuentes spends a good deal of his day talking to, because it’s simultaneously tormentor and sustenance. Folks often assume internet-famous people are charismatic in the way Charles Manson or Bill Clinton were charismatic, but that’s not the case, because the audience has the power. There is something erotic about it, not in a directly sexual sense, but in the way of intimacy, minds mingling, tension. Other commitments (like wine night) are rivals to this kind of love. The same structure pervades all internet fame, with the Perv Right just being an extreme form of it, because the vibes are so blatantly libidinal and the communities so estranged from the rest of society.

In the discourse of streamers, “you” is constantly consulted as an authority, asked to provide approval, verification, judgment. The audience is never figured as passive, and never directly persuaded: It’s implicit in the discourse of Fuentes that you already agree. Given this commonality, he seeks to be understood, not believed. His do you know what I’m talking about? is a cousin to “chat, is this real?” because it points to the function which the “you” of the stream is asked to perform: That of reality-maker. A person sitting alone in their room, rambling into the void, needs you to make the rambling into a thing that matters. It is a co-creative act, and it is that act, I’d argue, which people enjoy more than the personality of whoever’s doing the rambling.

There are two personae created by Fuentes: himself, and the open-ended “you,” which the viewer may imaginatively occupy. The “you” is the more compelling invention. We know the streamer doesn’t literally mean “you,” except for in the moments that you give him twenty bucks and your handle appears briefly on the screen. But if you live a life where most of the time, when someone says “you,” the implied person behind that “you” is worthless failson, disgruntled employee, or anonymous stranger, and you know that’s what they’re thinking of when they call you, getting called into a “youness” that is a highly-knowledgeable, understanding, and powerful entity feels great. It’s a “you” shared among others, but it is yours. And I have now tangled myself within the second-person pronoun, but do you know what I’m talking about?

If you watch either Clav or Fuentes’ streams, it’s clear each man is trapped in a hell of his own making. You could say they’ve made the bargain which Milton’s Lucifer did, preferring to “rule” that hell than “serve” in someone else’s heaven — but they only appear to rule their respective hells. They are really being prodded along by an audience that treats them with a kinky contempt: the looksmaxx forum guys ratted Clav to his college for roiding and kicked him out; Fuentes laments that he should just “become a liberal” at this point because his audience is too weird. And yet he continues to plead with them throughout the stream: do you know what I’m talking about?

My audience is not trying to goad me into chemically castrating myself or committing a hate crime, but you do feel the pressure of that relationship and, I think, so do friends of mine who create content. An audience is like a person you live alongside — someone you depend upon, worry about letting down, that you courted and were in turn courted by.

A TikTok user recently left a comment on a video of mine that struck me as uncanny, because it showed them imagining my interiority. I quote it indirectly here: “I feel like Aidan is more into this stuff than he lets on, or maybe had a phase with it at some point — the ‘playing along,’ the continuing focus…” This comment was left, understandably, after I’d posted a video talking about how my facial attractiveness PSL rating was only 4.9 (“low-tier normie”). This was based off an assessment from the free online looksmaxxing face scanner that may be selling my data to sketchy brokers who will someday jail me on the basis of my retinas when we are living under the Thiel Reich.

I never had a looksmaxxing phase, so the commenter was wrong. I was also never an incel. But I was a young person at the same time these guys were young people. I still am, I suppose. So I can’t say I don’t feel the dark pull of that digital romance, the ways it digs its hooks into the tender spots of the apparatus we have all inherited from the society that made us, encouraging certain neuroses because they were profitable to the purveyors of attention, porn, games, and now, peptides. I can’t say I don’t recognize the shapes of their shame, or the ferocity of their yearning for something better. And I can’t say I’m not attached to the same interfaces and algorithms they’re attached to, that I’m not also studying my analytics and changing myself on their behalf.

This is the source of my fascination with the looksmaxxers: a recognition of the way we are constantly microdosing falling in love with people on the internet. It’s a skewed, strange love. You can say the post got two hundred thousand views and know it was good. But you can’t say for sure if the joke you made at the Settlers of Catan wine night was good, because how can you accurately read the facial expression your buddy’s girlfriend made, and in a broader sense, how can you ever know the souls of her, him, your own girlfriend, and therefore, yourself?

From the other end, you can acknowledge the e-girl’s poetic anguish in ninety characters without needing to actually deal with her difficult personality. Or you can laugh at the edgy joke without having anyone hear you do it. As we integrate this frictionless machine logic into our own lives, you can AI-generate an essay instead of staring at the blank page, and you can measure your maxillary distance instead of looking in the mirror and wondering if you are “handsome.”

The hardest things are the most human things. I like the “frictionmaxxing” framing, which details how in our personal lives, technology removes short-term discomfort at the cost of long-term learning. But I find it can flit a little too quickly into judgments of people which, while warranted, distract from the heart of the problem. It’s not that people are taking the easy way out and technology is selling it to them. It’s that they are never asked to be anything further than what technology (and power) want to measure. We have lost an appreciation for the human personality because power in the 20th and 21st centuries did not want a nation of souls, but a nation of statistically-modelable consumers and rationally-addressable “issues.” The real allergy to friction lies not with individuals, but within our institutions.

The streamer asking “you” to be his guardian, his fact-checker, and his confidant is refreshing because we live in a world that otherwise asks a “you” to be something very superficial, and small. Nobody you meet nowadays just wants to chat, unless it’s on the internet. All the world asks is for us to contribute to its balance sheets. The company wants a purchase, the platform wants engagement, the employer wants a productivity metric, the teacher wants a score, the politician wants a poll number, the Palantir murderbot wants a hit. “You” is a thing to be counted, not known. This civilization eats people and shits them out as numbers. It has been that way for a while, but it’s gotten worse, more self-confident, more capable of counting more stuff. In the industrialized West, we have the best possible version of that bargain and it still fucking sucks.

These numbers compound, collateralize, and train entities that will live out the real stories, for which we are just the supporting cast. The ghoulishly chattering AI models; the suicidal markets that can’t stop selling poison into cells, clouds, and seas; the blundering, butchering bureaucracies compelled to repeat the same mistakes over and over. And there is no place permitted for pricelessness. Do you know what I’m talking about?