Let me make one thing very clear: I do not want to talk about Joe Rogan. That’s why you’ll notice the image above is not of him. It’s of Dave Bautista, who is by all accounts a very nice man.
Whether it's Tucker Carlson no longer wanting to shove green M&Ms up his butt or the world's smartest gorilla spreading vaccine misinformation on a giant podcast, controversy peddlers need us talking about their controversies in order to maintain the racket. No matter how epic your tweet dunking on them is, no matter how many likes and cry-laugh emojis you get in response, you are giving them the oxygen needed to keep the dumpster fire burning.
We live in a content economy now, baby, and algorithms can't tell the difference between positive and negative engagement.
Plus, I mostly do media analysis in this newsletter.
With that said, I didn't initially think this particular dumpster would be full of enough soiled diapers to burn for multiple weeks, and I think the issues at play here are worth spending some time on, so here's what we're going to do. I am going to talk around Joe Rogan, about the vague archetype of people like Joe Rogan and his fans, and about the surrounding platforms and comedians who make all of this so hard to deal with.
Let's begin with the most obvious point being missed by just about everyone in this conversation.
When it comes to scams, the stupidity is the point
You'd think four years of Trump would have taught people to spot the basic architecture of a scam, what with that being his entire deal.
It's a common misconception on the part of honest folk that scammers are stupid simply because their scams are. At a core level, scams need to be obvious. After all, the goal is to attract suckers, not savvy investors. You want your scam to be, on its face, glaringly illegitimate to anyone with two brain cells. That's how you filter out the folks who might catch onto the grift and cater only to those who would unquestioningly buy a piece of paper saying they own the Brooklyn Bridge and walk away thinking they got one over on you.
For the most current example, have a look at the NFT market, which is basically the same concept as the Brooklyn Bridge scam, except the bridges are vaguely racist procedurally generated drawings of monkeys and the people buying them are fully aware that, unlike a bridge, anyone can copy a Bored Ape with two mouse clicks.
When people point out how mind-blowingly stupid that all is, when they chuckle and type their little tweets about right-click>save, I want to grab them by the lapels, shake them until coins dislodge from their pockets, and yell, "The stupidity is the point, asshole!"
As this applies to Rogan, the fact that he is himself a bored looking ape is how he attracts the sort of audience that will defend him no matter what, in the same way that crypto-bros will claim they are not being made into chumps even as their funds are irreversibly stolen and their art is reuploaded to other marketplaces.
That's how the scam works. The stupidity is a feature, not a bug.
If you pay someone to be on your platform, you can't claim to be hands-off
For the past several years, platforms have uniformly washed their hands of racists, antisemites, queerphobes, transphobes, and so forth, by claiming that they are not in the business of censorship. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were among the first to do so, arguing that they cannot possibly be responsible for what gets posted by the literally billions of random people who use their services, among whom people with harmful beliefs are a statistical inevitability. All they can do, they said, is to beef up their community guidelines, hire more moderators, and streamline their enforcement processes.
Now, in those cases, I tend to believe that these companies have a point. The problem isn't the logic of that argument, but the lack of follow-through on their proposed solutions. Despite repeated promises to hire more moderators, Facebook only has half the amount needed for the job. Meanwhile, that lack of moderation has allowed the erosion of American democracy and what academics might term a "full blown genocide" on the Rohinga, a minority group of Muslims in Myanmar. YouTube, on the other hand, has done marginally better, removing egregious violators such as Alex Jones from the platform and making alterations to its algorithm, which famously radicalized a generation of young white men into straight-up Nazis. And Twitter? Well, it's Twitter. At least Trump is gone.
However, lately we've heard the same, "What do you want us to do? Take responsibility?" argument from companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and Substack, which is total bullshit if you pause to think about it for the time it takes the Netflix intro to go, "Duh-dummm."
Unlike Facebook and other social media platforms, these companies are directly contracting with the people getting them in hot water.
Netflix paid Dave Chappelle $60 million to slag off trans people.
Spotify paid Joe Rogan an unfathomable $100 million to get The Joe Rogan Experience as an exclusive (that experience presumably being the guy who used to make people eat worms on television saying the N-word in crisp, HD audio and occasionally slagging off trans people). Update: the true figure is $200M. The mind reels.
Substack, the platform on which I write this newsletter, pays the comparatively tiny fee of $100,000 to creators they recruit for their Substack Pro initiative, among which are peddlers of conspiracy, COVID misinformation, and (surprise) those who have even been kicked off Twitter for slagging off trans people.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said, "There will always be content on Netflix some people believe is harmful," before firing and suspending trans employees who criticized the company and organized a walkout. Substack said that, since you can just not read the newsletters of bigots if you don't want to, it's not a big deal that many thousands of people still do want to read them. And now, Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, says that "canceling voices is a slippery slope," even as Spotify removes dozens of Rogan episodes to prevent its stock from slipping further and even though the peak of that slope is a dude who says vaccines are killing kids.
Claiming that it’s censorship to moderate harmful content you've paid obscene sums of money for is a bit like letting a tiger loose in a preschool and claiming the kids are just going to have to duke it out with the cat.
Comedians aren't special, they just have a microphone to tell you they are
We don't need to spend much time on this because I think it's obvious to everyone except the people who worship comedians as S-tier social commentators. But those people are the exact same who think NFTs are cool, so we've kind of come full circle.
What happened is that a lot of dudebros with microphones and loud, shitty opinions, in an attempt to convince their audiences and themselves that what they do is not inherently meaningless, spent decades posturing as philosophers and other dudebros ate it up like horse dewormer. Because listening to stand-up comedy is a lot easier than learning actual philosophy (or checking to see if the Brooklyn Bridge can be privately traded).
To be very clear, I do believe in the value of comedy. I watch way too much of it to hypocritically suggest it cannot be a powerful tool to change minds. But the best comedy comes from honesty and humility. The best comedians are those who proudly admit their lack of knowledge and draw their humor from that which is accessible to them. (The same is true of writers, by the way.) By contrast, the ones who get high on their own hype, who think everything they say is a groundbreaking and profound statement on society, man never manage to break any actual ground or find real profundity.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Dunning-Kruger is real and if you don't believe me, I know a mustachioed man in a bowler hat who'd like to offer you the deal of a lifetime. You can find him in Brooklyn.
What is absolutely not a scam, though it certainly makes me a sucker, is the subscription model on which this publication runs. If you are feeling generous enough to buy me one medium sized coffee a month, please hit the button below! (There is a free tier if you’re the kind of person who just likes to watch. Kinky, but we’ll keep it between us. All articles are available to free subscribers because I’m a socialist.)
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