Part 2 of Mugshot and Trashmouth is going to have to wait. I know SquirrelTerror episodes take a short time to read, but they take a while to write and today I just don’t have those particular spoons.
Don’t worry, though. It’s coming. *cue Jaws theme*
Yesterday did not go according to plan. I didn’t even get my usual second jolt of coffee, what with publishing fuckery taking up my morning and a video meeting I had utterly forgotten about striking the instant I got home from a rather late run. But the fuckery has been dealt with–at least provisionally–and the meeting was very good, so that was a silver lining. By the time it was over, the afternoon had well commenced and more caffeine was a Bad Idea, so I chose to be Adult and Reasonable and Rational.
It was a difficult decision to make and even harder to stick to. Damn adulthood–I’d shake a fist at it, but that would take energy and might engender joint pain. Easier to just ramble onward.
The Princess dropped this video about the growing delusion of Main Character Syndrome into our family group chat, and while I was initially reluctant (since anything even “influencer”-adjacent threatens to give me hives) I ended up watching it after dinner, and the kids drifted into the office to share the experience. And boy howdy was it an Experience. Both kids had at least heard the names of everyone involved, and the Prince was familiar with some of the antics (the guy calling himself Mister Beast in particular, a moniker which makes me snort-chuckle sarcastically every time), but I was entirely blissfully unaware of most of this.
No longer can I claim that grace. But I was mordantly fascinated by the whole thing, and I have Thoughts. Here are a few of them, in no particular order.
“Main Character Syndrome” started out as a term to describe the quite reasonable psychological process of taking control of one’s own life, and of one’s own emotional responses to said life. In that usage it’s actually very useful, and a powerful tool. Since then it’s also morphed into describing a particularly noxious form of pathological, toxic behavior: treating other human beings as NPCs and side characters.
Psychopathy, narcissism, and sociopathy all share a critical core failure of empathy: simply not understanding, believing, or being able to grasp that other people are real, too. It sounds bizarre, because anyone with functioning empathy gets this at a basic foundational level. But to many varieties of toxic asshat, other people–ALL people, other than themselves–are simply ego extensions or cardboard cutouts to be manipulated into place, and the refusal of other living, breathing beings to do what the toxic person wants engenders world-ending rage. I use the term world-ending deliberately here, since many if not all toxic people are fully convinced the world will simply wink out of existence when they die–if they grasp their own mortality at all, which is uncommon among them. (That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)
The bafflement some wannabe “influencers” display when things don’t go according to their plans or wishes is part of the core failure. They are truly, honestly befuddled that the world will not do as they want, especially if they’ve had any early success in manipulating others or breaking social norms. Toxic people tend to mistake reasonable people’s refusal to engage with their norm-breaking as a victory, and when it stops working–when society or a friend group finally mounts an immune response against their toxicity–their response is yet more escalation, yet more manipulation, yet more rage, because it’s the only strategy they have and it appeared to garner some initial success. The magical thinking of “this got me what I wanted once, so of course it will again if I just apply more pressure” is another core feature of these personalities.
What fascinated me most in this analysis is the footage of a wannabe “influencer” coming right up to the brink of a realization, a little self-knowledge, and yet being apparently unable to take the last whisper of a step over into said realization or knowledge. In particular, a wannabe who did not successfully use the tools of stalking, manipulation, and norm-breaking to get his “hero” to recognize him (and therefore magically let him into the circle of “rich YouTubers”) stares into the camera and snivels a version of, “It’s like they don’t even care if I die on the street.”
I had to pause the video and take a breath because, my dude, how is this news to you? You’ve seen how this “influencer” treats other people–the same way you do in your quest for clicks–and yet you thought you were somehow special, different, a “main character” to him? Yet this fellow was patently unable to take the last step into realization or self-knowledge, and I was most exercised wondering why. Is it a refusal or a literal incapability stemming from lack of empathy? It is absolutely fascinating to see someone soooooo close, just a bare whisper away from a potentially life- and personality-changing epiphany, and yet so unable or unwilling to move that final less-than-a-centimeter.
Another interesting part of this whole thing is the deep and abiding hypocrisy of “influencers” who have achieved their goal of YouTube stardom (and my gods, babies, can’t you dream a little bigger than that paltry goal?) and have the absolute cheek to finger-wag at the masses of fan-wannabes using the very same methods of toxic social norm-breaking, stalking, and manipulation that the said “successful influencers” did. A prime example of this is the voice message from one saying “we keep our private lives sacred and separate from our YouTube stuff.”
Now, this is fine and perfectly right, I am the first person to be all in favor of keeping one’s private matters off the fuckin’ internet. It’s also stunning, world-grade hypocrisy from people who have built their careers trespassing social norms, using stalking behaviors, and being absolute shits to innocent bystanders “for the lulz” to suddenly turn around and say, “don’t you dare use these methods that I used to achieve fame on me, how could you, I have a right to privacy!”
Yes, you have a right to privacy. Some part of me thinks one abrogates that particular right the instant one starts shitting all over other people’s right to go about their lives without your “pranking” bullshit interfering with their days and jobs. It’s a grey area and a slippery slope, but what is not in the grey area is everyone else’s right to call out your massively hypocritical bullshit.
I’ve used a lot of quotation marks above for a specific reason. The term “influencer” irritates the living bejesus out of me, because the only thing you’re “influencing” is an algorithm designed to keep people angry in order to pump ad money into a corporation. I really don’t see how this is something to be proud of. And the whole “it was just a joke” thing infuriates me as well, because I grew up in a household where constant, severe, ongoing abuse was minimized with that very phrase and when I’m forced to watch someone being shitty “for the lulz” all I see is a toxic abuser who deserves real-world consequences applied, and sooner rather than later.
This whole video analysis also clarified a big problem I have with publishers telling authors to “just BookTok” or “get on YouTube” to do marketing. Part of the deal an author makes with the publisher is to provide economy-of-scale for certain necessary features of quality control, like copyediting, cover art, and the like. This is the entire reason we enter into these agreements. And part of the agreement is the publisher doing marketing, because they have the resources and again, the economy-of-scale to do so effectively.
Trad publishing has decided to take those resources that should go into marketing and instead funnel them into CEO and shareholder profits, while offloading the actual work and effort onto the poor overworked authors themselves. A crowning indignity is that BookTok and YouTube don’t even really work for marketing; the few who “hit it big” are lottery winners, sweeteners to keep the rest of the rubes pouring in their attention/ad engagement/cheap content creation. Just as the lotto is a tax on the poor, BookTok and its ilk are a tax on the already strained resources of authors and artists.
This is bad enough, but then comes the gaslighting blame game when a book sinks like a stone because the trad publisher did not hold up their end of the bargain. It’s exploitative bullshit, and one of the things that’s going to cause a massive market shift sooner or later–but not before a lot of already marginalized authors are pushed out of the industry, and we’re going to lose so many great voices and stories because of simple greed.
I mourn those losses. We all should.
The toxic form of Main Character Syndrome is prioritized and rewarded by the ad-engagement algorithm, and as it spreads it gives publishers and other media corporations another way to exploit authors and artists already staggering under an insurmountable weight of fuckery, just like rewarding sociopathic bullshit in politics leads to the breakdown of the rule of law and a rash of policies that oppress, maim, and kill. These things are the same. They are symptoms of the same underlying problem; they are features of the same mechanism. The terrible thing is not that the internet has allowed us to witness the problem clearly to a degree unprecedented in human history; no, the terrible thing is that this is the system working as intended. The cruelty is the point, the rewarding of bullshit “pranking” and stalking behavior “for the lulz” is part and parcel of the same systems that reward fascist sociopathy and norm-breaking in politics. The system benefits this type of behavior for a reason, and that reason is profit and control.
Whether the people engaging in this fuckery cannot or will not take the last step into self-knowledge or realization is to a large degree beside the point. The point is mitigating the damage they do–or ideally, stopping said damage. That starts with applying consequences for shitty behavior, which is one thing our society is overwhelmingly reluctant to do for a variety of reasons, some practical and others habitual. A collective response is necessary, and yet one of the timeworn tactics in the (very thin, though very effective) playbook shitty people use is divide-and-conquer: isolating, exhausting, and harassing targets to the point where a shitty person can get away with shitty behavior for years. By the time an immune response is mounted, the wreckage extends far and wide.
The people watching these “influencers”, gamed into providing “engagement” for ad dollars, are not quite victims. They’re resources being harvested in order to shift wealth to corporations. Maybe they’re even comfortable with the process; maybe they don’t mind being reduced to the battery Morpheus holds up in that classic explaining-the-Matrix scene.
I do mind. I’ll be glad to go back to being blissfully unaware of “influencers”–but I can’t ever be unaware of what they’re a symptom of. That’s thrust in my face daily, as a mother, a working writer, and a human being. I hold out no particular hope for change in my lifetime, but at least I’ve articulated the problem at length. No doubt it’ll be ignored, since it’s not a YouTube video or outrage-inducing TikTok/Insta short. Still, I take what comfort I may in the act.
And now the dog needs walkies. Onward to Thursday.
