Livestream It All
While in Edinburgh, I’m collaborating with Dr. Karen Gregory at the University of Edinburgh, an incredible scholar on gig work, online subcultures, the sociology of platform capitalism and digital infrastructures. We come from different worlds intellectually, but we have a lot of crossover in how we’re thinking about labour in these online spaces, and how often they complicate presumed ideas about value. This is the central question of our work right now, as we’re looking at livestreamers on Twitch, and specifically the bizarre trends that users partake in in order to attract viewers and subscribers, and therefore donations and money. I won’t go into the specific people we’re looking at, but I do want to talk about a tangent within what we’ve seen so far.
As we all probably know by now, livestreamers on Twitch and other platforms give up control of various aspects of their lives to their viewers, who may get to vote or spend real money to determine what the streamer should do next, from what outfit to wear to which drink to order from Starbucks. It runs the gamut from what action to take in a video game to mundane daily tasks to bizarre or creepy underworlds. Perhaps the most famous example thus far was “The Jerma985 Dollhouse” from August 2021, when Jerma985 gave control of their life to their viewers like they were a Sims character — the days-long event, sponsored by Coinbase, required a crew of 35 people and cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
As Taylor Lorenz documented back in 2021, everything is now potentially monetized, and while the app she chronicled then, NewNew, hasn’t caught on, the logic it emphasized — “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for,” — has. It’s entirely common on Twitch for streamers to be live for days on end, and viewers can pay to make it go longer and longer. They can pay, with a new feature called Crowd Control, to actually mess with the game you’re playing, like set a fire in your Sims house, or add a mod to Resident Evil 4 that makes Leon really tiny. They can pay to have a message broadcast to everyone else on the stream (whether it’s appropriate or not), or pick what game the streamer plays next. It can also much weirder. There are countless apps to help facilitate all this, though you don’t actually need anything outside of the Twitch ecosystem.
Actual numbers on how many streamers put this kind of control into the hands of their viewers, or how many people participate, are hard to come by, so I don’t want to suggest that this is necessarily the new social paradigm or something. Instead, I think it brings up far more difficult questions about the nature of what we value about the work that goes into all this. In research published earlier this year in Nature, scholars found that, alongside well-established inequalities in streamer income as the top streamers receive the vast majority of the subs, donations, ads, sponsorships, these top streamers also have a much easier time diversifying their monetization sources.
As they write, “Twitch provides an internal monetization system highly linked to the social affordances the platform aims at developing,” and so “it is via the skilful exploitation of the social and relational affordances allowed by the platform that streamers engage in a peculiar form of two-sided parasocial interaction, and are able to grow and consolidate a community around them.” The top streamers, moreover, easily further weaponize this affective work into the creation of volunteer moderator teams, where upwards of a dozen regular viewers moderate the chat out of a perceived relation to the streamer and a sense of responsibility over their content. Meanwhile, other scholars have found that viewers interested in directly altering the livestream in some way (called “System Alterers”) are among the most active Twitch users.
What all this suggests to me is that, in part, livestreaming is a unique social space centred on forms of interactivity that combine older relational ideals (cooperatively playing a game with others, creating a sense of community within a specific online space) with particular platform affordances that tie all this up into systems of monetization ripe for, as the Nature article itself puts it, exploitation. We may quibble or problematize with applying words like that, or weaponization, to the sociality being catered to in these livestreams, but it does at least reveal an undeniable element here: when there’s money to be made, potentially lots of it, social relationships are a very reliable source of revenue, if given the proper maintenance. This is how streamers end up burning out or worse, feeling forced into being constantly available, live in real time, accessible to all and willing to give up some sort of control over their own lives (even if we should, at the same time, be clear about how much of these “choices” are obviously designed by the streamers themselves, so in most cases the overall control is still theirs).
I’m still working out what all this means, but it’s fascinating to think about the messiness of cultural production, paid intimacy, and commodified social relationships in the context of platforms that ask much of their workers, without ever admitting that they’re working at all.
This is the End (Again)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment briefly on the recent glut of articles by extremely-online writers about how and why the internet is so bad, as this is only the latest outpouring, as I’ve written about before here and here. As Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick summarized, “After a couple years of things just getting slightly worse all the time online, it seems like we’ve now reached a stage where we all largely agree that, yes, the web isn’t very good anymore.” He then offers a rundown of these articles, from Kyle Chayka’s in The New Yorker, where he offers a familiar story about our non-social social media, to Katie Notopolous’ in MIT Technology Review, where she likewise provides well-trod solutions like “smaller” federated platforms that you might have to pay for.
One of my internet reporting nemeses (I’m normal), The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, also chimed in with with a typically wrong-headed take that identifies the problem (Big Tech tries very hard to exert power over us, as ongoing antitrust lawsuits prove), but then he talks about it like surveillance capitalist ideas are just now coming to light: “We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives.” Dude, you cover this industry for a living, what are you talking about? If this is how our esteemed tech reporters continue to treat the situation facing technology and society, the media ecosystem is woefully unprepared to deal with it in any kind of sophisticated way (which is why you subscribe to this newsletter, obviously!).
Broderick, who I very often agree with, is right again, I think, when he suggests that none of the quasi-solutions posed by these writers (including David Pierce’s suggestion at The Verge for something called the POSSE model, or “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere,” which would collect everything you share online in one spot) are really worth all that much, and that in all likelihood, “there is some pocket of the web out there that has already defined our digital future. We just haven’t noticed it yet.” Obviously, what we’re touching on here is also the demands of a digital media environment, which requires endless takes and analysis on what the internet is or what it seems to be doing, and I would wager that the last people to actually instigate any change online will be tech reporters — if anything, we will realize what has happened too late and do our best to interpret it after the fact.
I also think that this impulse inevitably engenders hyperbole. Look, obviously Musk’s tenure at Twitter has been disastrous, and the website is obviously full of more hate, spam, and shitty ads than ever before. It is a worse place than it once was. But in my day-to-day usage…it’s also not that different. I realize that as a white male user, I am able to avoid the worst actors on there, who are unlikely to target me for a variety of reasons. But I think it’s also true that tech writers tend to oversell just how nightmarish Twitter has become — it’s worse, but baby, it was always bad.
The larger point is an obvious one, which is that amid the liminal space of the social internet, which everyone seems to agree is in some nebulous state of transition, those that follow and report on it are likewise desperate for a narrative that can make some sense of it. If anything, though, the narrative may be that it is now not possible to craft a coherent one at all. Chayka, for instance, contradicts himself, noting how platforms like TikTok bring out not only our faces but our bodies, mannerisms, and bedrooms, perhaps in real time via livestreaming, and so “everyone is forced to perform the role of an influencer,” but at the same time, “fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers.” Are both of these things true? He claims “the barrier to entry is higher” (isn’t the opposite true, with the ease of use for tools on TikTok?), and “office workers are less tethered to their computers” — says who? Notopolous, for her part, argues:
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like.
The solution to the internet is more internet? These writers seem to be flailing around for a story that can make it all click into place, and end up tripping over themselves in the process.
A last point on this. I think we really need to reckon more seriously with proposals around paying for our content. As Notopolous puts it, “A world where only the people who can afford to pay $9.99 a month to ransom back their time and attention from crappy ads isn’t ideal, but at least it demonstrates that a different model will work.” I would argue it not only isn’t ideal, it’s vastly unsustainable in the opposite way that the “free” internet of web 2.0 was unsustainable. We live in an era, clearly, of low wages, underemployment, and alienation from labour, and the idea that one solution to our digital problem is having everyone pay $5 or $10 per month to every content provider that they like is insane. If you think, for example, that the current state of streaming entertainment options is too much — who can afford to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, and so on? — then this is only an absurd intensification, and it feels like a band-aid to a much bigger issue of income inequality and the offshoring of responsibility for it to patron-focused platforms like Patreon or Substack. Unfortunately, the answer to all of us getting too used to not paying for anything online is not so simple as suddenly making us pay for it. The rules of the game have been forever changed, and regular people are not in a place to bankroll it.
Ephemera
Two great pieces in The Baffler on Israel and Gaza. First, Séamus Malekafzali on the obscene failures of the Western media in covering the ongoing genocide: “For as long as I have been alive, the Western news media has been consumed by bloodlust.” Second, Dylan Saba spoke with anthropologist Darryl Li: “Some of these liberals might be a little bit more hesitant or self-critical in thinking about U.S. violence in a way that they don’t have to be when it comes to Israel because of this notion of righteous victimhood. This cheerleading of other people’s violence is of course also a means of vicarious enjoyment.”
David Wallace-Wells provides a striking overview of the Canadian wildfires this year: “But the smoke finds you almost wherever you are. This year, toxic air from Canadian fires spread as far as the lungs of those living in Nuuk, Greenland, where there was darkness at noon in the capital in late September, and of those in Spain and Britain, who choked on Canadian ash in June. When the smoke from fires in eastern Canada spread south into the United States, parts of the Midwest and Northeast registered the worst air-quality readings anywhere in the world.”
Song Rec: “Doubt” by Slow Pulp