Grift Wars: What Is The Internet For?
“Let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may
make a name for ourselves.” —Genesis 11:4
The Collapse of Organic Culture and the Rise of the Algorithm
The contemporary internet is not just a communications tool. It is an altar. And, these days, creativity and community are readily offered up as burnt offerings in the service of monetization and a moderated algorithm. The Digital World is a bona fide tower of Babel: a collection of voices, each shouting for attention and donos. This is a guided evolution whose telos, at one point, may have originated in an artform expressing something meaningful but is now just a highly competitive market of personality cults.
I call this transformation "Grift Wars," a term borrowed from Josh Moon of Kiwi Farms. It names an epoch in which public discourse, legal action, fandom loyalty, and content creation in general are entangled in one huge monetization club. And it's a club where you're not invited. The influencers of old have all but established their own religious followers, becoming priests of their outrage churches. Their communities might as well serve congregations. But who are the gods? X, Twitch, YouTube (among others). Digital idolatry.
The first casualty of the Grift Wars was authenticity. Early internet communities operated by shared love for niche topics or hobbies. Everything was far more insular. The algorithm changed everything. And then, awareness of the algorithm changed everything again. That's basically where we are now: deep within the crags of a meta-commentary about commentary.
Platforms used to shape public interest now only reflect user interest. They do well enough (although far from perfectly) because your life and the lives of so many other have become an open book for data gatherers. However, a problem arises as more and more people become aware that they've become an open book.
As an analogy, imagine you have just figured out what a fourth wall break was. You find it funny and, of course, you imagine you are the only one smart enough to understand the complexities of such gag because you're so meta...
...now imagine living in a world where everyone is not only knowledgeable, but hyper aware of it.
These are my thoughts following talks with Jon del Arroz (JDA) on the noticeable a decline in organic visibility on YouTube. With many other YouTubers (like Jeremy Hambly) chiming in, confirming what they see, what is clear is that this is not accidental. This is systemic.
Twitch, likewise, has undergone a ritual narrowing. Its front page no longer reflects the eccentric, diverse world of its user base. Instead, it insists on ideological coherence and identity alignment. If you're on Twitch, regardless of whatever hobby you might follow, the platform is obliged to feed you some recommendation that amounts to some VTuber screeching about nothing.
But, again, this is not accidental. This is curated exposure.
Legal Drama and Financial Piety
In a recent video of mine, I talked about a phenomenon that has evolved into a grotesque sacrament: the monetization of feud.
Ethan Klein versus Hasan Piker. Karl Jobst versus Billy Mitchell. SmashJT versus Alyssa Mercante. Lawfare is a performance. The courtroom has now become a place for content.
This shift was accelerated in early days by figures like Nick Rekieta, a YouTube personality who made his claim to fame livestreaming coverage of trials. While his current life trajectory has taken a steep, downward spiral what ought to be acknowledged is that Rekieta's channel pushed legal procedure into the digital entertainment mainstream, leading to many other lawyers jumping on the bandwagon. A path was then carved between legal analysis and content creation.
Now, more and more people speak fluently about discovery, torts, and defamation. Which is a good thing, right? Well..
The double-edged sword is that the law is now grounds for new theater. Not only do viewers receive a televised morality play with real consequences but now everyone can add their own performative expectations as icing to the cake. Additionally, lawtube enjoys fat donos.
The marriage between content and law has mediatized, however. In another video, I talked about how watching real people interact with each other in real time and in real situations has become like its own televised subscription service.
Funnily, even GoFundMe has unwittingly become part of this. We saw this most poignantly with Shiloh Hendrix who raised over $700k after she was harassed for saying slurs at a playground. Similarly with Karmelo Anthony raised over $500k in legal funds after fatally stabbing Austin Metcalf.
With this in mind, it is easy to imagine the road between the rise from being a "nobody" to suddenly becoming a celebrity. Unfortunately, this also means people will inevitably find a way to gamify the system for money and power, including online influencers.
This is my working theory on why platforms have quietly killed independent influencers. JDA compared this to the YouTube "adpocalypse" of 2016. But there's something different going on with this recent panic...
Note I said people will inevitably find a way to gamify the system for money and power. That is key. We know it is a common practice for commentators to ask their audience for donations. Donations can help fund various projects. However, content creators are also readily weaponizing their audiences against other creators for various reasons.
Those audiences become a liability for any platform that encourages community engagement. JDA getting more eyes on his products means more money and more influence. The solution, therefore, is to kill discovery. JDA can still have his channel, of course, but he will be given a campfire and not a bonfire. Any growth, even organic growth, will be stifled. The goal would be in making influence more predictable and gatekept. One might also suspect federal involvement in some stifling given how much the government hates competition and any form of meaningful grassroots organizing.
VTubers Are The Future
VTubers embody the paradox of contemporary identity. They are beloved not despite their artificiality, but because of it. The embody everything our current corporate overlords desire: something designed, branded, maintained and optimized for audience engagement. They are the ultimate product of the late capitalist attention economy. To continue with my religious metaphors, they are the sacred icons of their respective platform.
Among various subgroups throughout the Internet, I doubt you will find one topic more balkanizing than the concept of VTubers. Now, rather than go on a tirade about the evils of anime, furries or any other bizarre subgroups which I am sure many are familiar with, I'm going to cut to the chase. If we're in the middle of a societal meta-commentary where everyone is self-aware then consider this:
In many ways the VTuber is the perfect tool for corporate broadcasting. A VTuber is not free; instead it is rented out. If it no longer aligns with the corporate creed, spoken or unspoken, it can just be dismissed. Thus, its power is also their peril. For it is not its own. The companies that give them life also hold the keys to their deaths. "Graduation" is a pastel euphemism for forced retirement; as a ritual of excommunication. Once invoked, it not only severs a contract, but annihilates an identity.
Contrast this with Brett Cooper, the former host of The Comments Section on the Daily Wire. Under dubious circumstances, Brett left the company and was replaced by her producer. Now, Brett is not a VTuber. On The Comments Section her face was visible and known. Therefore the disruption was felt more deeply. Her very image had brand equity.
A Vtuber, on the other hand, can be replaced without a single pixel out of place. That loss of visual permanence is both a strength and a weakness: the machine keeps running, but the soul it once reflected is forgotten.
And as irreverent and rebellious as many of these VTuber personalities may seem (especially the ones who, ostensibly, promote themselves as Right Wing) VTubers are not immune to the moral tides of our time. They too can be just as performative as anyone else. They too will gamify the algorithm to ensure your beliefs are just as affirmed as anyone else's. That's how propaganda works.
The mask will slip here too. You will see blatant positioning of unequal standards, such as punishment for being racism or "transphobia" (Twisty Amanozako) but making exception for the anti-white variety (Uki Violeta). This reveals a deeper crisis: through corporate hands, the algorithm is not just reshaping content; it is redefining virtue.
Fortunately, communities are not entirely blind to hypocrisies. If rules are being bent for underlying beliefs and assumptions, if justice becomes unpredictable, people will eventually lose trust in the storytellers and not even the cutesy anime aesthetics will be able to save them.
Conclusion
Grift Wars force a question upon every participant in digital culture:
What is the internet for?
Is it a space of formation, where souls are shaped, communities made, and truth spoken? Or is it a space of fabrication, where identities are invented, crises manufactured, and value extracted? Is the goal communion or consumption?
There is voice worth remembering amidst the ongoing Grift Wars: Terry A. Davis, a tragic prophet of the early web who saw through the spectacle. In one of his mostly incoherent rants, he casually referred to the masses online as “n****rcattle,” a term both appropriately and uncomfortably descriptive of how the upper echelon view the masses: not as souls, but as livestock.
Given how effectively the Internet has been monetized, herded, and selectively culled, I reckon he was correct in his own deranged way.
NEXT: Transfiguration Without Transcendence - Why 'Stellar Blade' is Trans Coded
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I wonder what sort of good will arise from the actions of corrupt technocrats. I believe Hegel called this phenomenon "the cunning of reason". This reminds me of the last chapter of the book of Genesis where Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery and in their time of need, their cruelty ended up doing good.
Maybe it's going to platforms like Substack to directly communicate with a potential audience and eschewing advertisers and sponsorships in favor of direct subscriptions. I recall a few years ago where anyone asking for donations was called a "grifter".
I have mixed feelings to the whole vtuber phenomenon, but kind of like how I found Nine Inch Nails album "Pretty Hate Machine" surprisingly full of humanity despite the synthetic and industrial sounds, there's something interesting and perhaps profound in the rise of vtubers who don't age like the people behind them.
Again, another thought provoking and entertaining article.
Why was the internet Created? That's easy if you know where it came from.
From about 1916-1920, Fr Busa invented hypertext, portable data storage, computer networking, and more under the dream that one day every person on the planet could read a free, remotely-saved, auto-translated copy of The Summa Theologiae that would allow you to select every word and see definitions and select every sentence to see both officially-created and user-created footnotes.
In 1921, Fr Busa sold all his inventions to the IBM corporation and it took until the 1950's before IBM engineers could reverse-engineer Fr Busa's work.
The device and network you are using were invented specifically for complex Religious education like you would need for studying Doctors Of The Church.
In 1820, St Elizabeth Ann Seton saw the only vision that disturbed and confused her. St Elizabeth Ann Seton was shown just about every evil that would befall the world until The Three Days In Darkness, every change. The ONLY vision that confused her was that one in 1820, where she described in her writing as "every home having a black box of satan in it, and entire families would enshrine these on altars and worship at them and forget all they knew for what they saw within it."
St Elizabeth Ann Seton saw world wars, satanic covens micromanaging every second of people's lives, mass proliferation of devilry, atomic bombs, etc. and never was she shocked about any of it.
But when it came to the radio / television, the black box of satan, she was wondering how it could be that people were so stupid to let such a thing into their homes. The rest is just things from the past globalized and rearranged, as Venerable Fulton Sheen said: "All new errors are old errors with new labels." But when else have people willingly added in their own obvious demise and began to worship it, even the Holiest of people? Even the most satanic people in all History only begin by unwittingly worshiping evil under guise of the four temptations (wealth, pleasure, power, honor).
I would say the computer and internet (they were not designed separately, the former is just the intended interface for the latter) were God's answer to the radio and television, which is why the few remaining forces of the devil have no idea what to do with it and are deathly afraid of it.