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I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.
They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.
So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.
As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.
So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.
Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.
I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.
The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.
There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.
I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.
The only decent person I can name from the top of my head from the Gamergate saga who was not an out out shill, incompetent person, moron, bad faith actor or a complete weirdo would be Mister Metokur. He was disgusted by this new class of anti-SJW bros back in 2014-15 itself as they were simply trying to compete with ign instead of actually fixing anything and had dubious morals. Many just became leftists after getting their ass handed to them by actual dissident right wingers. Plenty of people did that, h3h3 and kraut and tea being two examples.
If you are a low-status person and hit a nerve on the internet, you will never leave as we all instintively know what our position in society is so the internet is this prallle world where you can kinda lie to yourself which fuels most of these people. The internet is not stable though and these firms demand you to churn out stuff to stay relevant and its a bad cycle.
I have never met anyone I really look upto since I dont look upto anyone. Indie artists are better than more popular ones since they don't have much in the way of pr. I will look up the books now since you brought them up.
I dunno. His whole shtick ended up coming off as fiddling as Rome burns, and I'm not sure how much I buy his moral disgust, when he explicitly promoted some of these personalities in what seems like an attempt to get at people he considered "cringe".
Completely fair, although I am surprised that people here even know of him or the entire post-Gameergate saga. Small world. I guess Faith Goldy did alright now that she is just a regular suburban canadian mom and Pewdiepie is a regular Swedish dad.
I don't think Pewdiepie deserves to be lumped in with these people. He was (maybe is? I have no idea) way more famous, and way less political, he just got targeted because he was non-woke in a then very liberal ecosystem.
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How much do you think is were horrible people or were marginal people that got the chance to turn into horrible people. For a brief possibly closed window fairly normal people could luck there way into a bit of fame with few guard rails. For males easy money and easy sex are hard to pass up.
I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.
The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.
The funny thing is: Milo seems to have been destroyed the one time he seemed to be totally sincere.
There was no reason for a gay guy trying to redpill millennials and conservatives to talk positively about pederasty. No reason to do it more than once. He dropped the glib act for a few minutes and picked about the worst thing to be honest about/rationalize.
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Milo also recently started taking more alt right type positions given X is less ban happy. Most of this has been grifts unfortunately. Baked Alaska is a funny case study in e celeb culture, guy went from normie lib to nearly alt right to back again and then whatever nick fuentes does.
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