"Bald and Bankrupt" is a YouTube channel by Brighton-born Benjamin Rich, which I found myself perusing last night in horror-mazement. It's a British man who is indeed bald, but, one assumes, far from bankrupt. A fan of alliteration, perhaps.
The premise seems to be that our hero goes around shoving a camera in people's face in developing countries. No-one is safe from the long arm of his selfie stick. He will turn suddenly on the street and angle it straight at them, right in their fucking grill. He will march into their place of business and thrust it straight at them, right in their fucking grill. No warning, no consent, no respite, no apology, no regret, no holds barred.
Mr. Rich acts at all times like every cubic inch of the Earth and its atmosphere, up to and including every last living organism on it, is his to make moving-talking-colour-pictures of, to comment on, to judge, to ridicule. All on his schedule. It's capitalism at its finest, the gloves finally off.
Like browsing one of the imageboards, the unbelievable brutality of it keeps you scotched to your seat. You almost are impressed by his insistence on the bit. You want to turn it off but find yourself going come on, he can't keep this up, this can't be serious. Is he for real? Does he break character after the show, or is this a sincere member of my species who really is like this, deep down in his heart?
We don't know, but the videos are real, and some percentage of the views are real. There he goes, ploughing his way through crowds of people, cranium glistening in the sun, shades on, telescopic arm with attached all-seeing-eye-of-Sauron extended up into the sky, judgmental and snide observations at the ready whenever he's out of earshot of his most recent victim.
You say to yourself: am I reading too much into it? Maybe it's not as bad as it both looks and feels?
Then you finally take a peek at the comments. It's pure pandemonium; the punters compete to say the worst thing they can think of. What percentage is bots versus real humans, who knows, but whatever fleshy humans are there, they've understand the message loud and clear - they battle to out-do each other with the heinous, tribalist, racist, essentialising, violent simplifications and vicious remarks. You might find a dissenting voice, I don't know, but you'd have to trawl very hard.
It's the right-wing-4chan-meme-ification of all things which Peter Thiel + associates have been dreaming of as they pumped money into these things the last decade or so. It's the Memetic Warfare openly discussed in their policy papers. The Frankenstein monster is out walking on its own, it has escaped from the lab, and we inhabit its world.
A great many people simply ignore these corners of the internet, perhaps becrying how things are going in the world but, essentially, still hoping it'll all blow over.
I could ramble on in various directions but want to get back to the quote-unquote real world, as much as such a thing exists: thus concludes today's dispatch from the frontier.