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Notes -
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.
Personally, I don't even remotely enjoy juggling around a zillion different names (IRL, ToaKraka, a single-purpose name that needs to be active only on certain rare occasions, a single-purpose name that used to be active but now is inactive due to my lack of energy/willpower, a few single-purpose names that are inactive but can be used if necessary…), and I wish that I could just operate under a single unified identity. But I feel like your analysis goes too far. None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics. Your analysis applies, not to "everyone", but only to those public figures who actually try to project unique personalities on social media.
Also, you forgot to link to the definition of "becoming a deranged parody of oneself", flanderization.
Similarly, literally nobody in the 12+ years I've been using it has grokked that my username is "Face H".
So nobody has bothered to ask what became of Faces A-G.
FaceH would be clearer in this regard than faceh, which I assumed was a whole word with some private meaning for you, pronounced "FASS-eh." This is not to doubt that you have circulated through faces A to G, just to say this may explain why no one has asked.
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