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For the libs - read 'On Authority' by Engels. Its very short.
(www.marxists.org)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I think it's pretty simple why people like Vaush and that sort of cohort.
Y'know how there's those boomers who have news blaring on the TV or, less frequently, talkback radio blaring in the background 24/7?
I think that's what streamerbros are to the younger generation.
It's something that you can put on in the background while you're playing an FPS game which doesn't really require any particular mental engagement because there isn't really anything particularly difficult to grapple with and very little that challenges the dominant worldview or which considers hegemony in a different light.
It's mostly just a regurgitation of the prevailing narrative and prevailing tropes and the occasional gotcha-style "dunking" on someone.
I don't play FPS games because it's not to my taste. There's a small handful of RTS and turn-based RPGs that I'll play which I know like the back of my hand and at times I'll listen to podcasts or lectures or audiobooks on theory/history/current affairs from a radical perspective and while I'm playing those games even then, with games where I know exactly how I'm going to play, what's coming next, dialogue that I can skip over because I don't need the in-game direction to advance the plot etc. I still find that I can't focus sufficiently if the content gets too heavy.
His content is vapid but I think that's a feature and not a bug, at least to his audience.
He also reaffirms people's biases so you aren't encouraged to do any introspection or self-reflection or hard personal work.
He assuages the latent guilty conscience of a non-reader by reassuring them that they always have the correct position and their assumptions about the world and theory are correct. He is contemptuous towards reading theory so, for the non-theory gang, this makes them feel better about themselves and it even makes them feel elevated above the people who read.
Vaush skim-reads Wikipedia on stream and delivers hot takes on matters that he is obvious to. The person this attracts is the type of person who also skim reads Wikipedia for a small fact that "vindicates" their position in an online debate.
He has a degree in sociology and I remember on a stream clip he discussed Durkheim's concept of anomie as being, like, nihilism and whatever. This is sociology 101 stuff and anomie has nothing to do with nihilism but he couldn't even provide a basic definition of this simple sociological concept. Tbh, Durkheim's not my jam and I can only ever remember 3 of the 4 categories in his quadrant discussion anomie on the spot because I'm cursed but there's no shame in not knowing this stuff if you're schooled in sociology but all it takes is to pull up an image of the quadrant and to discuss anomie in relation to its opposite in order to elucidate the concept. (Legit came across a suspected Vaushite on social media use the term anomie in a way that implied the same meaning as Vaush did and which in no way applied the correct meaning one time and I called them out for getting their definitions from Vaush rather than bothering to spend 5 minutes reading up on it in Wikipedia before using the term and they never replied lol.)
Same can be said for how he had to look up Cypress to discover that it's a country before discussing "Sigh-pree-yachts" as if he knew anything about the subject. This is the go-to guy for a cohort of people who want to form their opinions on geopolitics smh.
It's just trash. It's junk food for the mind and that's its whole appeal.
And he's sort of intentionally playing into this type of audience, right?
I guess the bigger question then is why do people not want to just f#!kin' read, or listen to an audiobook, or join a study group, or whatever... I'm sure it comes from the cognitive dissonance between despising exploitation and doing nothing to address one's own — but simply denying that inconsistency is such a half-measure, right? So why do people like to choose half measures, when they should be going all the way?
It's definitely playing into this type of audience.
I'm not sure if Vaush fell into the grift or if he's just the product of an organic process where the largest audience accumulated via accretion because he was the most palatable (or I guess there's always astroturfing too but that seems a bit more farfetched) and the less palatable streamers just don't find traction because it's too challenging and thus less palatable.
From my engagement with his fans, it's not about wanting to do anything it's just about wanting to feel correct and to have claim over a sense of moral high ground.
I can't remember any times where I've had a discussion with a Vaush fan where they've used disclaimer terms like "I think" or "my suspicion is" or "my opinion is". They seem convinced that their opinion is always correct and they never seem to say that they don't know about a topic or that they only have a superficial understanding of something. I think that the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play in a big way here.
The epitome of this was when Vaush made the argument about voting Biden in and then pushing him left (once your bargaining chips as "the vooter"
have already been surrendered to the DNC.) I pressed Vaushites on what the strategy was for pushing Biden left around the time of the vote and in the months after, saying stuff like "He spends hours streaming most days right? Has he devoted a single hour to detailing what strategy you're all going to take to push Biden left yet? What's the plan?" and I'd inevitably get downvoted and ignored for being so impertinent.
Nobody ever got back to me with any activism or organising strategies from Vaush, naturally.
Vaushism is where any aspirations for becoming more educated or more active go to die.
I think they actively want half-measures and they want to be reassured that their half-measures are adequate, and that they're doing a radicalism simply by sitting back and watching his streams.