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We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
I'm reminded of Demolition Ranch.
For those not aware of the name, Demolition Ranch is a guntuber who's been doing gun-tubing for quite a while, and recently stopped to focus on his family.
People have commented on how his later content diverged quite a bit from his early stuff, with sensationalist activities and click-baity titles and zany video cards.
When questioned about that, he basically replied that what was getting the most view count, hence the pivot. In other words, that's what getting him the money.
The attention and engagement economy, it seems, says alot about what the mass of humanity demands.
I think its also just the hypercompetition that results because 'attention' is a fixed resource, and so every single advantage you can leverage to capture it becomes critical, so everyone evolves towards using every little hack/trick to keep their content in the public eye, lest they be left in the dust.
Whenever someone makes the jump from doing content creation as a hobby/side-gig to full-time career you see the shift. Shorter videos, higher pace of uploads, and general drop in quality while minmaxing every little detail that keeps people engaged and improves ad revenue. The content becomes, fundamentally, an afterthought
Then they branch out into the other standard revenue streams. Patreon, a podcast, and maybe a livestream channel... then the death knell (imo)... political commentary.
Mr. Beast is perhaps the apotheosis of this pressure to keep wining attention. He's an apex predator in the environment, but at the cost of selling his soul to the algorithm daemons.
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