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What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:
The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.
On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.
I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.
Twitch is basically softcore pornography at this point. So much "content" revolves around implicitly or explicitly referencing sex, and even the most innocent looking female streamers are apparently sex-crazed addicts or are at least pretending to be?
I have a very dim view of livestreaming.
I really, REAAALLLY despise that for any given popular female internet figure, there's at least even odds that their 'main' account, where-ever that may be, is the top of a sales funnel that leads to some kind of sex work at the bottom.
I also despise that the 'meta' for such accounts is almost always to pretend not to have a boyfriend even if they are fucking married, and to deflect but not reject the misguided romantic ambitions of their followers.
And the "joyous" thing about people streaming the entirety of their lives all the time is that when they end up having a meltdown, its aired publicly for drama points too.
Its about the most toxic cycle of drama begetting drama for a hapless but raptly attentive audience while producing nothing of value in the process I could imagine.
Of course, that's humans for you, the evolutionary pressures of tracking social drama for surviving the ancestral environment makes it so we fucking LOVE following popular train wrecks.
Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.
Personally, I have never really gotten watching other people play video games. I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games. I can also see a race-to-the-bottom dynamic happening where the best point to make money ends up being just shy of violating the content policy of your platform.
I think that the starting point of sex work is debatable. It is well known that people on TV are on average hotter than the general population. In the broadest sense, this could already be called sex work -- of you got a job reading the news because you are a nine rather than a five, then part of your job is just looking hot, and there is a continuous path from that into softcore and eventually hardcore porn. If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.
Presumably, a large part of your income will not be from the people who watch one or two videos of you gaming, but from the small minority which develops an unhealthy parasocial relationship with you. By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.
Its fair to say that's almost a symbiotic relationship. It just seems obvious that they'd all be a bit better off/happier in a different equilibrium.
There are in fact 'non-toxic' streamers and communities out there, of course!
Its just more common than not that once streamers 'get big' its a ticking clock on when they get outed as either terrible people or they have their big obvious 'sell out' moment.
Getting outed as a terrible person might not even hurt their popularity (I'm thinking of Dr. Disrespect, but there's a lot of them).
There definitely seems to be a factor where a lot of normies are wired up to perceive themselves as part of a community and having a 'friendship' of sorts with livestreamers, since at least they can 'interact' (using that term pretty damn lightly) with that person and see their impact on the streamer's show.
Yep.
YEP. I've noticed this is a path that some streamers have taken. Creating actual content is HARD. So a women might get popular for being good at a game, or she's pretty but stays very modest. But how to keep interest in your channel going? See my point about the zero-sum attention economy.
But over time if the popularity starts to taper (or she just wants more money) she'll follow the incentive gradient to risque cosplays, to bikini/pool streams, to lewd but not explicit content, then there's the decent shot she goes from there to straight up porn (and, who knows, maybe escorting behind the scenes). And every step of the way generally being coy and plausibly deniable ("just getting more confident in my body, guis!").
World's oldest profession, after all. Of course when I say "incentive gradient" I mostly mean her overly invested fans who, if they feel like they don't have a shot at dating her, will probably be satisfied just getting to see her naked eventually.
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