Recursiveness

Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas posted a video essay about Pink Floyd's The Wall today.  It's a pity that the movie itself is not the subject of Olsen's dissection, but Nostalgic Critic's 14-y.o. take on the film, released in 2007.  At one point in the essay, Olsen says of the N.C.'s version:

"Okay, so ... what is this?  Why does this exist?  I'm going to have to say a bunch of unkind things, and there's really no way around that."

Olsen's take, and Dan Olsen himself, sits in the upper echelon of youtube content — though some can agree and that's fine, though it's probable that such persons are either not very educated or have received the wrong kind of education.  In the last couple of years Olsen has been embraced by that crowd that includes people like Lindsay Ellis, Abigail Thorn and HBomberguy, whose collective works are ... um ... less.

The reason N.C.'s garbage about Pink Floyd exists relates to mainstreaming: the practice of making a marginalized group less marginalized through the use of Language and Visibility.  Nostalgic Critic is tremendously more marginalized than Pink Floyd, but had/has an audience on youtube that can be teased into watching something horrifically bad, and therefore memorable — which is the goal.  It is more important, where it comes to being visible, to be memorable than "able" or "good" ... and the more explicit and offensive the language being used, the more memorable it is.  I quote someone else with more visibility than Nostalgic Critic, Lily Allen:

I wanna be rich, and I want lots of money
I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny
I want loads of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds
I heard people die while they're trying to find them
And I'll take my clothes off, and it will be shameless
'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous ...

Okay, so, what is Dan Olsen's video?  What is it?  Why does it exist?  Why does Dan Olsen do a video about Nostalgia Critic and Not the original Pink Floyd movie?  Well, because Olsen's credit is built on being clever and a little bit funny, so it doesn't work as well for him to mainstream upon Pink Floyd's artwork as it does to trash N.C., since the latter is a better conflict and remains inside Olsen's cred.  Dan Olsen is much more marginalized than N.C., so it follows that he increases his presence by vocalizing a level of repulsion and "saying unkind things" as his particular form of mainstreaming.

Good.  Now, I am much more marginalized that Dan Olsen.  Olsen easily picks up 80,000 views on the first day of his posting a video (or so far today), whereas I get no better than about 600.  I used to do much better, when I trashed everything and everyone associated with D&D, as many as 1,500, but since I decided to stop going after that whale, my page views have plummetted.  Many days, I don't do better than 400.

If beating a drum for views was my goal, this post would trash Dan Olsen and defend Nostalgia Critic, since that would be the more egregious conflict-maker, and would allow me to mainstream off both while providing little or no insight to the issue.  I'm not going to do that — but don't take that as evidence of my virtue, oh no!  I will get additional page views merely because I have used the names of both, and the names of Pink Floyd and Lily Allen besides.  The mere typing of famous-person names on a website is how a nobody becomes a somebody on the internet.  Philip DeFranco (I might as well mainstream him as well, as I did that trio of dreck Ellis, Thorn and Guy) invented his name out of using as many names of famous people in videos as often as he could, thereby building a following for himself.  Mainstreaming works.

As a writer, for me, it comes down to making choices.  For example, I dislike using the acronym "WOTC" on this blog, though I do occasionally for the sake of clarity.  I prefer to call them "the company" when writing in context, just as I often refer to D&D as "the game" rather than using the official term.  Fundamentally, I dislike giving credit to either, as I don't respect the company and "D&D" as it is understood by most people is spectacularly obverse to the game I play.

Likewise, some readers may have noticed that I prefer the spelling "gawd" instead of "god," or the capitalized version "God."  This reflects my deep and abiding loathing of christianity — opinions that are expressed well by Seth Andrews (see, I snuck in another name, not to mention that now I'm mainstreaming God), though his take is not new and has been around well before I was old enough to seriously question my upbringing.  I also like to use phrases like "For the love of pink bunnies" or "So help me Elvis" as a reflection of this perspective, rather than the more traditional of these oaths.

The difficulty of mainstreaming on the internet is not that it doesn't work.  It works fine.  So well, in fact, that original content is nearly impossible to find.  It is even more frustrating when someone who has, in the past, proved their ability to create original content, such as Dan Olsen, decides to churn out his first video in three months on a subject designed to reduce his marginalization, rather than actually make something new, that I might conceivably watch more than once.  It gets worse when familiar, liked voices on the internet, who gained my attention because they created original content in the beginning of their careers, now produce nothing but mainstreaming content because, apparently, they've run out of gas.  Examples would be, inflating my visibility by an additional name or two, Ian Danskin from Innuendo Studios and CGP Grey, who's been flogging a bag of shit in the shape of a horse for several years.

This happens in part because it is metaphorically easier to be Ahab and chase the Great White Whale than it is to be a whaler and gather that oil people need.  The end result is predictable and hasn't changed.  Steadily, the channel and the "producer" grow more and more wearisome, as the page views become increasingly subjective and of questionable origin, while the increased visibility of the mainstreamer is pulled down into the churning marginalized waters of millions.  "Big whorls have little whorls, which feed on their velocity; and little whorls have lesser whorls, and so on to obscurity ... er, viscosity."

The recursiveness will kill you.

I could leave it there on that pithy statement, but I feel that first I must point out that my deconstruction of the DMG has more than a flavour of mainstreaming attached.  Unquestionably.  I'm attempting to mitigate that compulsion by spending more time talking about how I carry forward a particular rule set (writing "content") than I do trashing the DMG.  It would be easy to write post after post about what's wrong with the DMG, or any D&D book, and I have.  I have because it's easy.  Because a content-producer can't help noticing its been a week since something was written.  And because every content-producer knows that, well, no matter what's written, so long as it's conflict-ridden, it will make the readers happy.  Everyone likes to read about conflict!  And hey, I don't have anything else going, just now.  Content is hard.  It's way easier to write a post mainstreaming something I've seen on the net, or even writing something about mainstreaming, since it keeps the words pouring out and the eyeballs in the desired direction.

I hope that what I've done here is provide insight about the subject, both about this post's topic and the DMG.  Insight has merit ... but trust me, I don't fool myself that insight is "content."  It's not.  Insight is pointing to a bunch of ducks on the water and saying, "Hey, look, there's some ducks," when another viewer might have missed them.  Then, together, we can spend a minute or two appreciating the ducks, which is nice.

But that ain't fucking content.