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Notes -
Two screens, more literally than usual
There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.
In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says
I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.
Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:
I know about this controversy much more than I should have, mostly by following Asmongold on this. At the end of it I think Hasan really used shock collar on his dog. I do not have "evidence" at this point as I really did not assemble all the clips, but I will throw it here:
There is much more than just one video here. In true 4Chan manner, a host of clips surfaced where Hasan moved the remote around, where his dog reacted strangely when she left the designed place while the stream was muted etc.
The dog really serves as a prop on his streams standing for hours in the same place.
Hasan changed his story many times to the point of it being completely incomprehensive. It produced memes on its own
He apparently had some bull breed in the past that he did not treat kindly. He used some sort of barbed collar and generally was not nice to it, e.g. pulling it by the tail etc.
At this point I do think that he used the shock collar and in general is probably not the most responsible dog owner. On its own it seems like a simple story, one I would not even comment on. But it has life of its own now, and is a stand-in for general information environment. Even with controversial Taylor Lorenz now being part of it. Of course it generated great number of memes and other content, including AI generated song and more.
I agree with this.
After seeing just the initial video, I was probably around 51-60% sure that he used a shock collar.
After his attempt at explaining away the collar the next day, it shot up to 95-99%. Without taking into account the fact that all analysis of the video shows that the collar he showed is consistent with a shock collar with its removable prongs removed and then taped over and is not known to be consistent with any vibrating-but-not-shocking collar as he claimed, the simple fact that he presented the collar the way he did, briefly showing in his hand, with huge chunks of it covered by his fingers, barely holding it still for more than 0.3 seconds before taking it away from camera view, was enough. Someone who's been on camera as much as Piker knows how things look on screen, and if he were genuinely motivated to reveal the honest truth that he truly was not using a shock collar, he would have shown the collar in a different manner, by holding it by part of the strap and slowly rotating it around in front of the camera after verifying its focus, while making sure there was minimal movement besides the rotation, so that every part of the collar could be seen clearly. And he would have done this during the stream in which he was accused, not on the next stream (the fact that a multimillionaire like him didn't find a decoy non-shock collar in that time that looked similar to the shock collar when worn by a dog in that time is curious - either hubris or just the limits of physical reality).
And, of course, this was also after he and/or his followers claimed that the yelp was caused by the dog clipping its nail on the bed - something quite possible, but also something quite non-evident in the video. This claim was memory-holed basically within a day, replaced with the "it's a vibration collar, not shock collar" claim.
This sort of behavior is consistent with someone who believes he was caught shocking his dog and highly inconsistent with someone who believes he was falsely accused of shocking his dog. If Piker believes that he was caught shocking his dog, then I believe it too.
I'll also add that, given how easy it is to look up and see the primary sources for oneself, anyone who's defaulting to ignorance and just listening to what people on various "sides" are telling them to think is someone I believe is motivated to remain ignorant for fear of finding out the truth (or just someone who's not interested in it).
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