#where you are aware every second of the death spiral of social care and community support in this country

[karliahs]

The average public library is not only a provider of the latest Anne Enright or Julia Donaldson: it is now an informal citizens advice bureau, a business development centre, a community centre and a mental health provider. It is an unofficial Sure Start centre, a homelessness shelter, a literacy and foreign language-learning centre, a calm space where tutors can help struggling kids, an asylum support provider, a citizenship and driving theory test centre, and a place to sit still all day and stare at the wall, if that is what you need to do, without anyone expecting you to buy anything. [...] The trouble comes when libraries – and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them – start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. “We risk becoming a social care safety net,” said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and “our staff are not clinical staff”.

[lapsedgamer]

Death Stranding (PS4)

Death Stranding is the culmination of four years of anticipation and, for me, mild concern. Hideo Kojima was taken from the height of his career at Konami and the more-is-more excess of Metal Gear Solid V, and thrust in to an environment where he had - seemingly - far fewer resources at his disposal but not even the slightest hint of oversight. The years of development steadily revealed a director who was in no way financially constrained, and whose Hollywood aspirations seemed to be more heavily indulged than ever. Yet to actually sit down and play the end result is to meet a new kind of Hideo Kojima game, one that is markedly different in tone and style, which indulges his need to spell out every bit of world-building and research but which provides a structure where that content can actually be appreciated, one where gameplay expresses theme and cinematic flourishes are a garnish and a dessert rather than the core of the experience. This is perhaps the most Hideo Kojima game yet, but it is also one of his most creatively successful.

Death Stranding opens in media res in the style of the best science fiction, dropping the player in to conversations full of of unexplained but curiosity-piquing terminology that invite you to sit, listen, interpolate and reason out how the story world must work. It is, if anything, too mysterious - the player is thrust in to a mission of nation-spanning importance without a grasp of some of the more important character relationships that are supposed to motivate it - but it cultivates the mindful, steady, curious mindset that is the primary tone of the game, and it sets the you up for the explanations and background reading that will turn from a trickle to a steady flow as you progress.

The gameplay cultivates a similar sense of patient contemplation and constant observation. Sam Bridges’ movement in the game world is engagingly tactile but demands a steady and considered awareness of the terrain and his own current state. The left stick does not merely direct Sam across the landscape in the fluid, effort-free manner of the modern third-person adventure but very noticeably shifts his centre of balance. Run down-hill at a clip and you’ll feel his front-heaviness start to get away from you; ease back or even pull back on the stick and he’ll continue to descend at speed for a time but with his body more strongly centred over his scampering boots. Stride across widely spaced broken boulders and you will become conscious of the need to alternate left and right movement to balance out Sam’s inertia, lest he begin to pivot off in to a spiral and eventually crumple on to one side. 

In time, this becomes second nature but never becomes automatic. The game doesn’t demand the constant, finicky persistence of a Bennett Foddy game, but nor can you simply set your eyes on the horizon. It’s the closest a game has come to the sensation of a good hike, your brain absorbed by the task of placing your feet while devising the best route across the terrain towards your ultimate goal in the distance. Even when the game gives you equipment and upgrades that make traversal easier, these are balanced such that you are using your focus in a different way, not abandoning it entirely. A rope may allow you to abseil down a precarious cliff-face and skip a lengthy walk, but the abseil itself - and any subsequent climb back up - needs care, lest you knock your backpack cargo on an overhang and send it plummeting to the ground below. Bionic legs that automatically assist your balance on rough terrain come with a dramatically reduced cargo-carrying capacity which will tempt you not to use them. Vehicles all come with jump buttons, not to greatly enhance their manoeuvrability but because of the absolute certainty you will wedge them, and their un-carryable tonnage of precious cargo, in between some boulders. (Their turning radii are even tuned so that you need to consider the best line to follow on paved highways.)

Movement itself is at the bedrock of the game’s hierarchy of goals. Your medium-term objective in Death Stranding is always a cargo delivery from one place to another, which must be completed according to certain conditions of volume of goods, speed, or cargo damage. Individual deliveries can then be manually threaded together, in the manner of Elite or any MMORPG fetch quest, in to an overall plan, which will boost your standing with multiple customers in an efficient manner. To play Death Stranding is to be conscious of the relationships between structures in space and the topography upon which they lie, and to exploit them to the best overall benefit.

This is game design and a tone which almost entirely reject conventional ideas of mastery and excellence. In Kojima’s other games, success depended upon acting with skill, speed, and excellence, but Death Stranding consistently rewards persistence, thoughtfulness, and planning, and denies you the opportunity to achieve a friction-free, graceful effortlessness. Even the game’s finale ranking system is grindable; Kojima simply does not care whether you reached your grade by doggedly completing a thousand shoddy deliveries or dramatically resolving one hundred excellent ones. A great Death Stranding player is not to be found weaving through the landscape like a death wind as in Metal Gear Solid V, but standing patiently in a river waiting for their stamina to rebuild, or contemplating the long way down a mountain rather than the swift, risky descent of a cliff face.

Which brings us to theme, and the first time in many years that Hideo Kojima has successfully communicated his game’s ideas through the gameplay itself. The core concept of connection is clearly expressed in the delivery-based gameplay, which as I’ve mentioned forces you to consider the spatial relationships between locations. The cargoes themselves tell stories about subtler connections: who might be sending which objects to who tells you about their collaboration, cooperation, and perhaps even attitudes. These connections are made concrete by your ability to build structures in the world, with each bridge or ladder or road speaking to the links between the previously-isolated denizens of the United Cities of America. These connections are in turn shared between the different players: structures and even misplaced cargo and vehicles from other players’ worlds will appear in your own, and vice versa, to be exploited, improved and recovered towards your now-shared goal of reconnecting America.

The game reinforces at every stage that you must collaborate to succeed. Structures are expensive, particularly in the early game, but by sharing with others you can create a better, less-frustrating and more survivable world. Hiking through the snow and rounding a hill to find another player has built a refuge for your cold, wet, hungry Sam is like spotting a warm cafe window on a cold and lonely evening. You will be rewarded for, and you can reward, this altruism: the sending kudos every time I come across a rope or ladder has conditioned me to smash the like button on every social network I use with a ubiquity and enthusiasm that I was sure had been washed away by cynicism. This may be the best and most positive argument yet that games have the capacity inherent in all art to influence people’s thoughts and behaviour.

Kojima’s newfound emphasis on thematic gameplay has not tempered his love of narrative exposition, but it does fit Death Stranding better than his previous, more action-oriented games. The opening couple of hours and the finale are exposition-heavy cut-scene-fests in a universe full of vaguely human ciphers with motivations that are relatable yet communicated entirely through exposition. (There’s some remarkable Hollywood talent here doing its best to sell it, but the scenes focused on each character are, enjoyably, completely incongruous with each other, like a low-key Spider-Verse treatment.)  But for the bulk of the game, all eighty contemplative hours of it, the player is left largely to their own devices, with the scene-setting and research-regurgitation coming almost entirely in the form of text dumps. In Death Stranding, more than any Metal Gear Solid game, there is time to mentally unpack the ideas about human connections Kojima is lecturing you about, and a setting and goals that actively encourage you to consider the implications. As narrative fiction it’s unsubtle, with cloth-eared dialogue and a bias towards expressing its ideas verbatim rather than through the characters, relationships, or even much of the plot, but viewed as part of a game, and of this game, it actually works well.

There is actually an idea I’ve been toying with, since Tim Rogers made the case that Hideo Kojima writes non-fiction, that perhaps he is a creator of edutainment games: that the nearest analogue of something like Death Stranding or Metal Gear Solid 2 is not Stalker or The New York Trilogy, but Crystal Rainforest or Granny’s Garden, or I guess Where On Earth Is Carmen San Diego (we never had that here, but we got the TV show), a game where you’re given a great deal of non-fiction knowledge in an enjoyable, interactive environment. True, Death Stranding lacks quizzes to test you on your acquisition of the knowledge, but I think that’s probably the least important part of any edutainment game’s design. I made the joke recently that Hideo Kojima spent one hundred hours reading about the words, concepts, and objects related to the English word “hand”, and by golly he’s going to make you sit down and do the same thing, but I’m not sure it was entirely a joke, or that it’s particularly negative for the game to work this way. Perhaps Death Stranding is the world’s greatest multimedia educational experience. Perhaps Hideo Kojima should just start giving TED talks and get it all out of his system.

Death Stranding is entirely itself in a way only an indie game or a Hideo Kojima production can be, and was destined to be divisive. Its patient, mindful pace and resistance to streamlining are bound to frustrate those who approach games as sport, and its needlessly convoluted plot and casual disregard for narrative will turn off those expecting an interactive movie from the supposed master of the form. But the past few months of going for long, productive hikes in the mountains, surrounded by ghosts and rewarded by lectures about puzzling scientific curios, has been a genuine pleasure. 

A modern classic.

[bipolarsurvival]

Day to Day Life with Bipolar Disorder

https://blueeyedstoryteller.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/day-to-day-life-with-bipolar-disorder/

by James Heaton

Bipolar Disorder isn’t the type of disorder or condition that you deal with occasionally. It isn’t like having migraines that pop up unannounced every now and again. Not to diminish the severity of people suffering with migraines, or other disorders, because they are all incapacitating in their own respects. But bipolar disorder changes how your brain functions, how you process emotions and information. I have often felt that it alters a person so much that they are almost a sub species when compared to people who do not have the condition.

               I can recall the emotions I had as a child, extreme depression mixed with bouts of hyperactivity. I recall being hypersensitive to people’s responses and criticism. The awareness that comes from years of seeing how others react to similar situations compared to how I react has enlightened me to the fact that I am different. I was diagnosed at the age of 24 in the year 1996. At that time computers were beginning to become a normal thing in people’s homes, the internet was being used more and more. The amount of information was no way comparable to what is available today in the year 2021. The only access I had to information about bipolar disorder was found in books at the library. It was still mysterious and very hidden from the public. At that time, I knew no one else with the disorder. I was all alone if someone had it they didn’t discuss it openly. In 1997 my second child was born; it never crossed my mind that bipolar could be passed genetically to her. I didn’t worry about her one day developing the symptoms and battling with this disorder. I know now that it is passed genetically.

               But here in the year 2021, I can join multitudes of groups on Facebook for people with bipolar disorder, I can search Amazon for hundreds of books on the subject, including one I wrote several years ago. The difference time makes is astonishing. With all of these resources and information available I have broadened my knowledge and understanding of how bipolar works. The most important aspect of this information is understanding that people who do not have bipolar do not have the major drops in energy and the flooding of depression that comes with a severe low. They don’t experience a tsunami of energy that comes from a manic phase. They, for the most part maintain a steady flow of emotions that are neither up nor down. They may feel sadness in response to tragedy or loss, and they may feel excitement from happiness or elation from chemical responses. I am always hesitant to use the word normal, but it works. These people, the normal population, feel an appropriate amount of rise and fall of emotional response to everyday life. But those with bipolar can be hit with a jarring low that sends one spiraling down into an incredibly dark chasm of depression from something as simple as a criticism. The intense energy that comes from mania can push us into hypersexuality, overspending, life threatening choices all without the ability to understand and control our actions.

               These ups and downs come without warning, many times from simple triggers that initiate the emotions. Hearing bad news can trigger a crushing low, and bipolar disorder doesn’t care if you are in the middle of normal life experience. It comes out of nowhere and manifest into a crippling, debilitating wave that can knock you down and last for days or weeks. And the mania will build, starting with a welcome flow of energy but before you even realize it you’ve maxed out your credit cards buying things you don’t need, or jumping in bed with a stranger that you’ve only just met.

               Medication can help, it can lessen the severity of these actions. But so many newly diagnosed people start taking a new medication that may or may not work for them. Each medication is different in that its response to your body’s chemistry may be different than it is with others. Many people can’t tolerate certain meds, and the side effects can be severe at times but usually for a short period of time. The dry mouth, the nausea, the weight gain, and even the heightened drowsiness that prevents you from functioning can easily dissuade people from sticking with the medication. It is extremely frustrating in the beginning. When you chose to get help, and against your comfort levels you seek out a doctor, its not always pleasant. I’ve had more than my share of psychiatrist who are cold and extremely clinical. They are more robotic than anything, they function without basic empathy and understanding of the severity of this disorder. I believe this is mainly contributed to their inability to truly understand what it is like to be bipolar. But there are good, understand and caring physicians who have a level of empathy that can benefit the patients. It took me over twenty years to find this type of doctor. I have taken so many medications that I have forgotten more than I can recall. Eventually you run out of choices and learn to tolerate some of the side effects for the benefit of being able to decrease the ups and downs.

               But it is the living day to day that becomes exhausting at times. No day is ever the same as the day before. And the uncertainty that you face not knowing if today is going to be an up or down experience, or even a mix of both. So how do we maintain, how do we keep fighting to exist day to day to day? Everyone who suffers from this disorder will tell you something different. But I have found a system that continues to work for me, and maybe it can help you.

               Let me add that I have had several hospital stays over the years. I have undergone Electro-Conductive Therapy, aka ECT. These treatments have assisted me in my journey, they may not be the answer for everyone, but keeping an open mind to treatment is a primary ingredient to success. Hospital stays are different for everyone, but I like to look at it as a safe refuge from the outside world. It offers an escape from the issues that often trigger us into depressive or manic phases. In the hospital you are able to comfortably speak about your issues, with a doctor or a group of like-minded individuals. You learn coping techniques, and you can experience different medication under the constant supervision of medical professionals. The downside of hospital stays is being away from the things your surround yourself with to feel secure. If you can adapt enough to see past this issue, then time in a hospital can benefit you greatly. ECT is an extreme treatment that is not for everyone. I was at a place where suicide was the only option for me. I had progressed to the point that medication had stopped working, counseling had no benefit for me, and I had convinced myself that death was the only way to stop the pain of life. ECT can erase chunks of your memory as it alters your way of thinking. It’s a sacrifice that I felt I had to make in order to survive. I regret losing those memories, but I am ultimately thankful that I no longer look at suicide as an answer. That being said, it is a treatment for some but not all.

               Communication is extremely important. Being able to channel your thoughts and ideas into words and sharing with someone is extremely beneficial. But not everyone can hear what you have to say. I am lucky to have a caring wife who has been on this journey with me and talking to her has benefitted us both. Being able to explain to someone what being bipolar is like is difficult but worth its weight in gold. We have to learn to express ourselves, through speaking, writing, music, or art. We must channel that energy into an outlet that allows us to express the extreme emotions that we experience daily. Find your outlet, experiment with different forms until you discover what works best for you. Over a course of time, I have gone from being secretive about my disorder to being able to verbalize it daily. I no longer fear retribution from others for sharing my truth. It is part of me, it is part of my existence. Never feel shame for who you are, learn to appreciate that this is part of you. The illusion of a normal, well adjusted human is simply that, an illusion. We all have issues that we deal with daily, and it is beneficial to embrace the truth.

               Adapting your life to accommodate your disorder is very important. You may not be able to be the social butterfly that you dream of being. You may find solace in being alone and away from others. If this is the case, embrace it, but make efforts to socialize periodically. Find a close friend or relative that you can open up to on a regular interval. Being in a judgement free environment is empowering. Having a daughter who suffers from bipolar has opened my mind in so many ways. My need to help her has allowed me to overcome many personal obstacles. Its sometimes like taking a step out of my existence and becoming the person she needs at that moment. I can take a break from my struggles and offer advice or comfort because I know that is what can truly help. I encourage people with bipolar to find support groups, either in social media or in real life. NAMI is very important and offers support groups for individuals and families. And just as it as important to surround yourself with support, its equally important to cleanse your life of people who are toxic to you and your treatment. If someone close to you isn’t supportive or willing to become supportive and educated on your disorder, it is necessary to distance from them.

               Looking inward, to learn our triggers, to gain insight in the things that make us feel the way we prefer to feel, is essential for day-to-day survival. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things. I suggest if you have a desire to try something new or different, you do so with a trusted ally by your side. A trusted ally will understand you enough to know the smallest signs that your about to hit a low or a high. They can tell when something isn’t quiet right with you and can be there to comfort you in this time. True friends are hard to find, but they can make the journey so much easier. And it’s not just human friends, our pets can empathize with us and protect us.

               I suggest daily routines, as they lessen the chance for surprises that can be triggers. Eating healthy, avoiding alcohol, getting a full night’s sleep can all benefit each and everyone of us. With these small additions to our lives and schedules we begin to limit the chances of triggers. But triggers still happen, and that is why it is very important to make a plan of care. Take the time to create a plan for when you are down, and for when you are up. Favorite tv shows, music, objects, weighted blankets, anything that brings you joy, or comfort need to be easily accessible when you are triggered. Our phones can be very beneficial in these times. Avoid posting on social media when you are up or down. Instead, you can utilize them to watch a relaxing video, or show. You can play your favorite album on repeat or look at images that relax you. This is referred to as grounding. I have a passion for watches, I always wear one. When I need to ground I take my watch off and hold it with both hands, feeling the metal bracelet, turning the bezel, or watching the secondhand sweep past the seconds. Its entrancing, it takes my mind off the issues I have and connects me to an inanimate object. You can do this with a coin, a piece of fabric that you enjoy touching, or even taking off your shoes and standing on grass. Connecting your senses to things that you enjoy can be a positive distraction. I sometimes play the introduction of the original show, Cosmos with Carl Sagan because his voice comforts me. I can listen over and over until the moment passes.

               Find your happy place, find your sanctuary, and make it essential to your care. Plan your days in advance, this lessens the chance for surprise. And never be afraid to say, I can’t do that. Feeling obligated to do certain things that cause stress, or anxiety can force a triggered response that is damaging to our health. Surrounding yourself with people who understand that you are limited in what you are able to do can prevent unwanted sudden changes in our schedule. I keep a thorough calendar in my phone, with every event and action listed. I also keep an old-fashioned paper calendar on my refrigerator with all my activities and times charted for my family to see. They understand that adding things to this calendar can cause triggers. So, establishing rules is essential. The key to our success in coping with bipolar disorder is being firm in our rules for day-to-day living. Its only natural to regret not being able to be spontaneous, or on call with our friends and families, but we must establish boundaries. There are no exceptions to this rule. We must strategize our lives and actions to work for us.

               This takes time, it took me years to get to a place in my life that I put my health first. I still have family members who just don’t get it. But that isn’t on me, its on them. And we have to realize this. All you can do is inform and make your needs known. Learn to say no and always put your mental and physical health first in your life. Bipolar disorder doesn’t go away or disappear with time, it is a lifelong commitment, and we can make our lives easier and better managed with a few changes and simply prioritize your health.

               Keep fighting daily, keep living and never give up. Be the best you that you can be. Know your limitations and set boundaries.

copyright 2021 

[cultofzac]

YouTube’s Monster: PewDiePie & His Populist Revolt

Felix Kjellberg, known to his fans as PewDiePie, is by far YouTube’s biggest star. His videos, a mix of video-game narration, humorous rants and commentary, have cumulatively been viewed billions of times, and more than 53 million people subscribe to his channel. He has been called “the king of YouTube” and countless variations thereon, and he has remained unchallenged on that perch for years, making millions of dollars and leveraging his popularity into outside ventures.

But Monday night, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Disney-owned Maker Studios, a longtime partner of Kjellberg’s, would no longer have anything to do with him; later, YouTube announced that it was canceling a show developed with Kjellberg, and removing his channel from its lucrative “Google Preferred” advertising program. At issue was a series of recent comedy videos. In one, he found performers on the freelance site Fiverr willing to dance and hold up a sign of the client’s choosing. He asked them to write “Death to all Jews,” and they did; in his subsequent video, he expressed shock that the request had made it through. “It was a funny meme, and I didn’t think it would work,” he said, mock-begging news outlets not to make too much of his stunt. “I swear, I love Jews,” he said, “I love them,” before playing a few notes on a kazoo.

As he anticipated, plenty of news outlets saw a story in his antics. Others saw something more. A post on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, marveled at Kjellberg’s performances, and wondered in disbelief if they might signal sympathy for its ideology. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since the effect is the same,” the post said, “it normalizes Nazism, and marginalizes our enemies.” As the controversy mounted, Kjellberg denounced the “hate-based groups” that had taken notice of his videos. “I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online,” he said in a Feb. 12 Tumblr post. “I think of the content that I create as entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary. I know my audience understand that, and that is why they come to my channel.” This explanation, unsurprisingly, did not satisfy Maker Studios, or, for that matter, Google.

It’s tempting to write off this scandal as an inscrutable product of a teen subculture, wrapped up in layers of irony and the peculiar language and aesthetics of YouTube. It is likewise easy to frame the episode as an isolated collision between offensive speech and careful sponsors. But it’s most useful to understand Kjellberg’s meltdown in the context of the vast platform on which it took place — YouTube — and the nascent strains of politics that could come to define it.

With more than a billion users, YouTube has become not merely a platform but almost a kind of internet nation-state: the host of a gigantic economy and a set of cultures governed by a new and novel sort of corporation, sometimes at arm’s length and other times up close. It’s a system Kjellberg has spent recent months antagonizing in a broader and less-inflammatory way, even as he continued to thrive within it. He bemoaned its structure and the way it had changed; he balked at its limits and took joy in causing offense and flouting rules. Over time, he grew into an unlikely, disorienting and insistently unserious political identity: He became YouTube’s very own populist reactionary.

In December 2016, Kjellberg’s account was about to pass 50 million subscribers — a milestone, and a record. But in his videos, he seemed to be ending the year on a pessimistic note. “It’s time for me to complain about YouTube,” he said in a video. “Again.” The platform, he suggested, had changed in a way that he found worrying, and maybe punitive. Subscriptions are the fundamental organizing principle of YouTube – akin to a Twitter feed, they deliver to users exactly what they’ve signed up to see – but, Kjellberg said, they were becoming less important to the way viewers found videos. What YouTube was doing instead, he claimed, was packing people’s feeds with material they didn’t care about, from channels they’d never subscribed to. His viewership numbers had suffered as a result, he said. His rant spiraled on from there, swerving among resentment and self-deprecation, grievance and absurdity, toying with both revolutionary and reactionary tropes, and ending where it had begun: with a threat to close his account.

It might seem hard to believe that anyone would want to watch a YouTube video complaining about YouTube’s internal economic politics, but more than 20 million people did (the video’s title, “DELETING MY CHANNEL AT 50 MILLION,” surely helped). For years now, in fact, YouTube has been one of Kjellberg’s most-addressed subjects, second only perhaps to video games. In September, he even collapsed the distinction between the two, releasing a smartphone game called Tuber Simulator. The object is to become a famous YouTube star. Players begin their careers in a dank, windowless room and scrounge for views and cash, with videos like “Bikini Wax Your Pets” and “GO Outside – Walkthrough,” the latter a play on a common form of video-game vlog. It’s both an extended joke about making money online and a functioning, moneymaking app. “If the intention was to make a biting critique of late capitalism, Pewdiepie and Outerminds have wildly succeeded,” Gita Jackson wrote for the gaming site Kotaku. “But if not,” she continued, “the game still gets there by accident.”

For product reviewers and gamers, for the unboxers and the how-to teachers, for the interchannel drama analysts, the bloggers, the makeup artists and the pranksters, YouTube looms large not just as a context but also as a character. The daily exigencies of life on YouTube are perhaps the only subject that cuts across every major YouTube category. Showbiz loves to make movies about showbiz, and television loves to make television about TV. YouTube has simply democratized this impulse.

It makes sense that YouTube would become home to such a performatively self-aware economy. It is, after all, one of the most mature of the major social platforms. It is extremely culturally productive, and can claim genuine stars as its own. Above all, it pays. And in the people who depend on the platform to pay their bills, it inspires a peculiar mixture of paranoia, desire, gratefulness and disdain that shows up clearly in their work. YouTube’s peculiar relationship with the economy within it is fraught, promising and poorly understood. It’s also unique among social-media platforms — but maybe not for much longer. For now, most of the biggest internet platforms are understood as venues for communication, expression and consumption. YouTube has given us a glimpse at what happens when users start associating social platforms with something more: livelihoods.

Watch enough YouTube programming on any subject and you’ll gradually come to understand the struggles of starting and maintaining a channel. You’ll become familiar with the mementos Google sends creators at subscriber milestones — a silver “play” button at 100,000, around which time your favorite YouTubers might start talking about quitting their day jobs, and a gold one at a million, when they are more to likely have done so. You’ll hear plenty about conversations with YouTube support, many of which contradict one another. You’ll develop opinions about YouTube’s copyright rules, age restrictions and advertising policies. You’ll get an intuitive sense of the YouTube attention marketplace and how people try to take advantage of it, and you’ll hear about advertising rates. You’ll hear conspiracy theories — some rooted in daily shared YouTube experience, others rooted in less visible fears, desires and resentments — some of which gain considerable traction.

And why shouldn’t you? YouTubers are not employed by YouTube, but they are paid by YouTube, because it matches their videos, automatically, with advertisers. The platform and the video-makers share a clear and common goal: to persuade audiences to watch more videos in order to make more money from ads. But even with a unifying cause, creators inevitably discover smaller ways in which their goals and YouTube’s are at odds. It is in YouTube creators’ interest, for example, to understand the best practices for getting the most YouTube subscribers, or the best strategies for making videos that YouTube might algorithmically recommend. But it is in YouTube’s interest for the inner workings of its platform — including recommendation algorithms, the way it calculates advertising rates and the precise locations of its boundaries — to remain at least somewhat secret, to prevent creators from gaming the platform’s quirks at the expense of either YouTube’s user experience or its bottom line. Criticism from its creators is one of the many things YouTube tolerates to maintain this arrangement, which is otherwise clearly working to their benefit.

Emergent politics of social platforms differ in scope and character and sit along peculiar axes, some familiar, others new. On Twitter, which does not pay popular users, they revolve around matters of speech and harassment; the platform hosts a range of progressive movements as well as an extremely visible and openly racist reactionary movement, and they have been at war. On Facebook, which is bigger and less combative, they focus on censorship and governance. But on any major platform, they tend to grow from the same fertile place: the gap between the structures built by the company and what users are allowed to do within them. Inevitably, this leads users to fundamental political questions: Who gets what, and why? Who gets to do what, and why?

Kjellberg’s December video drew responses from other YouTubers, debunking or explaining or affirming the claim by YouTube’s biggest star that the platform just wasn’t what it used to be, some gathering millions of views of their own. In retrospect, though, one brief moment in the original video was especially notable. As he wound down his rant, he hinted at a different sense of victimhood, drawing from the same sense of umbrage but directing it in a startling direction. After criticizing the platform for not understanding the realities of working on YouTube and wondering aloud if he was being punished, or somehow demoted, he affected a sincere voice and said, “I’m white.”

“Can I make that comment? But I do think that’s a problem,” he continued, before a smash-cut and a return to a mocking rant about not letting YouTube win — another assurance to viewers that, as always, he was just kidding, and that the offensiveness of the prior claim was the reason he’d made it.

Here, again, it is helpful to situate Kjellberg properly. He initially rose to popularity within the video-gaming subculture, which, beginning with the “GamerGate” movement and continuing through the American presidential election, became surprisingly and darkly politicized. His core audience is young, and his sensibility clearly appeals to a masculine teenage impulse to shock and provoke. The YouTube platform plainly incentivizes such attention-grabbing behavior, right up until the point that it becomes a liability to its operators or their other partners — a familiar dilemma in the entertainment world, sure, but one that plays out quite differently on YouTube, which is considerably and deliberately less hands-on with its talent. It’s telling that YouTube’s biggest star portrayed the platform as distant and capricious. It’s alarming that following his performative hostility led him to where it did: attempting to rationalize the use of anti-Semitic speech under the guise of transgression.

Kjellberg had, either instinctively or intentionally, constructed a political identity as YouTube’s insider class-traitor, raging against a system that’s — trust him, but also he’s just joking, but he would know — totally rigged. Now he is sketching out what a far more toxic YouTube politics of ressentiment might look like, under the threadbare cover of ironic bigotry, the recent history of which is worryingly instructive. In the meantime, the self-identified real racists are laughing along heartily, even as Kjellberg strenuously attempts to distance himself from them.

Maker Studios, which seeks to create a sort of auxiliary production apparatus for YouTube, has less of a connection to the platform than any of the YouTubers it has partnered with, who belong much more to their audiences, and to YouTube. Its severing of ties, in the bigger context of YouTube, amounts to a disavowal. YouTube’s reaction, and how it follows up, is the thing to watch. As, of course, is Kjellberg’s. His most recent video, posted after Maker Studios and Google made their announcements, was a lighthearted play-through of a gag video game called “Genital Jousting,” and did not reference the scandal. His commenters, on the other hand, did, asking almost uniformly that he not apologize for anything.

The full character of the burgeoning politics of platforms remains to be seen. But right-wing movements have found early traction and see opportunity. Even as farce, Kjellberg’s performance has been illustrative, and a small number of eager observers say they hope that, as backlash mounts, it will be galvanizing. “If Pewdiepie wasn’t #AltRight before,” Vox Day, a former video-game designer and an alt-right leader posted on Gab.ai, a private, Twitterlike service popular with the movement, “he is now.”