Zero Irony: Patreon is Wonderful. The Right Wing is Wrong.
03 January 2019 [link youtube]
Patreon is like a grocery store for political ideas: and it's really (really!) wonderful compared to the options we had before (both as creative artists, and in trying to advocate for social/political change). The controversy over the exclusion of Sargon of Akkad, followed by the resignation of Jordan B. Peterson and Sam Harris (not to mention Milo Yiannopoulos) is the context for this video. However, truth be told, Patreon was a massively controversial thing within the vegan movement circa two years ago (many questions about its influence were raised at that time) and it then slowly ceased to be controversial.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the main purpose of this video is to
talk positively about why I think patreon is a good thing to really extol the virtues of patreon with absolutely zero irony the caveat there being I think it's worthwhile to talk about when patreon is used correctly and when it is used incorrectly and you'll see why I use such such seemingly objective sounding words I think there is a right way and a wrong way to use patreon as a crater we're gonna wrap that up in just a couple of minutes before we get into it I think I will reply verbally to a few of the comments that's come into a the video immediately prior to this one one person wrote in to me saying quote I don't quite understand why an intermediary like patreon has to exist person a likes the content that person B produces and wants to financially support them why does person C even need to be involved why is there need to be an intermediary so I think in this video I'm going to give you an answer that question um the level of trust you need to have the level of commitment you need to have to just take money put it in an envelope and have it disappear into a black hole just take money put it an envelope and send it to the Green Party or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and get nothing back get nothing back no news no update no proof of what has money that is a huge huge huge leap for people to make and there are some causes that inspire that kind of commitment I'd say an easy example would be save the whales save the elephants where you can go out and give a rousing speech and show a short documentary clip and say hey this is us helping to nurse this elephant back to health and providing you know some kind of habitat some kind of enclosure for this elephant to live in donate your money now to help to help orphaned and injured elephants like this very a moving very emotionally evocative appeal for donations some people will step forward take their money put it an envelope setteth you or if you just provide your banking details that will send you a bank transfer and expect nothing in return now you can guess even from how I'm phrasing this I don't think that's a good thing I don't really think that's a positive side of human nature I don't think that is a positive side of the charity industry I think it's quite dangerous and really self-destructive for a lot of the people involved and what patreon offers you is a much more porous transparent meaningful and interactive relationship between the donor and the person or project being funded so even for something like a book project you know if you say okay donate money I'm gonna write and it will straight this book and then publish it the ability for the donors to stay in touch with you you could put up a daily update or a weekly update I upload a lot so most of my patreon subscribers they're getting multiple multiple messages per day on patreon I've just been a mass uploader really the whole last five years not worth getting the why but maybe it's once a day or maybe it's once a week hearing from that person you haven't the opportunity to talk to that person say okay well we just had a conversation with the illustrator we're trying to get the illustrations ready for the book we ran into this roadblock this illustrator at first was really confident but then when we started going into detail about the three-dimensional perspective we wanted for these illustrations they seemed like they weren't confident doing it we're gonna talk to another illustrator by the way this is not a hypothetical example I went through this exact process trying to get an illustrator lined up for a children's story book I'd written that's that's in comparably different from an incomparably better than the bad old days of just taking your money putting in an envelope and sending it off to some political cause and then never hearing back now if it's the example of publishing a storybook how satisfied or dissatisfied would you be if you donate money and then five years later the storybook materializes you'll probably be angry and disappointed even if the book turned out great or what if it turns out not as you had hoped maybe the book is kind of mediocre like well I'd imagined it looking like doctors ooh and instead you know the approach these guys took not what I was hoping for with this book well if you have something like patreon and let's say the book project takes five years everyone involved in supporting you is hearing about and interacting with you step-by-step as you go through these disappointments and setbacks they're seeing you make the decisions strategic and artistic and aesthetic maybe their ethical decisions - like oh yeah yeah well at an earlier stage he thought it would look like a dr. Seuss book but then this happened and this happened started working with a new art artist and it ended up having more of a Disney look let's say that your book ends with you but they will have felt involved and included and at least they had the ability to complain at least they had the ability to quit even maybe they had the ability to ask for a refund I don't know you know this type of porous interactive transparent social media platform makes the whole culture of giving and receiving something much different than it ever was in the past and I had the experience in the bad old days the bad old days before the internet the internet just barely existed title movie 1998 I remember in the bad old days how awful it was to even have to ask for donations for the Green Party of Canada there were people asking me and it's like look if I donate money to this political party what's gonna happen to the money and what do I get what's the reward okay you can preach to me some abstract karmic notion of doing good in the world I'm not interested in your philosophical abstract idea of karma I want results I want outcomes I want accountability I want transparency and yeah what that kind of interaction I want to feel like my donation matters in my opinion matter is my perspective matters and even if things go wrong I want to be there with you seeing step-by-step what went wrong and why so patreon is a really powerful really meaningful transformation of the donor recipient relationship this I've already explained most of what I have to say when I I now add the Kabat if it is used correctly now when is it used incorrectly showed it to haenyeo mania who have no respect for under this heading I signed up and donated money to hennya of she kind of bullied me into it said okay and yeah I'll sign up for your patreon group when I signed up for haenyeo manias patreon if you don't know who Hania Mania is she used to be a vegan activist now she's like an international travel and lifestyle blogger who doesn't do vegan activism at all but she used to be a being an activist I signed up for her patreon and I was looking at a blank screen nothing absolutely nothing no talking to the audience no direction and as an apology you got this message saying hey now that you join my patreon you can use this link and join my special secret Facebook group where I interact with patreon supporters like to compensate for the fact that she was aware that her page round was a desert it was just empty there was no effort into it so then I clicked on that link to Facebook same thing dead empty was a desert it was a Tundra and there was nothing there she'd be no effort so if you donated to her patreon you get nothing absolutely nothing the people who support me on patreon they got all kinds of stuff good bad or indifferent I mean just just yesterday we recorded a 24 minute video in response to one of my patreon supporters asking me problems about her personal life and I you know we really sat down and took 24 minutes that to answer this question so Sun is just a personal emotional question I get sent in Suns it's a political question I do a lot of in-depth quality interaction with my audience and they also just get updates about what's going on in my life like for a couple of days I didn't upload any videos it was only a couple of days because I was busy flying to France taking care of my daughter and recovering from jet lag so they get some sense of interaction on going all the time so be patreon in its format and what it provides is a really really positive thing and guess what that's implicitly admitted by these so-called free speech critics of patreon because what they say in their critique is that they want to do the same thing as patreon they want to compete with page runner they want to replace patreon they just want to create a version of patreon that reflects their political priorities good luck you can try you can have a right-wing patreon you can have a racist patreon it's already been done I read there's a website called hate Rhian with an H so it's a pro hate Pro racist version of patreon so who but this is not really a criticism of the function of patreon it's at a positive appreciation of the function of patreon is just a complaint that they want a version of patreon with a different political bias or with a different ideological agenda they're not even criticizing the idea of patreon having an ideological agenda ok so another comment I was going to reply to someone objected to my my comparison of patreon to a grocery store I said look grocery store has to make decisions are we gonna have this politically offensive magazine for sale we're gonna have pornography for sale and a grocery store will make the decision not to carry pornography even though they could earn money they could maybe make more money by having pornography on the store shelves because it makes the grocery store look bad so someone wrote in disagreeing with this which is reasonable you can have your your own opinion and he says no patreon is only a payment processing service so it is not reasonable to compare them to a grocery store this is more like a bank shutting down a pornography store on the other side of town or something it's not comparable to a cross restorer refusing to carry porn now this is my reply I said no patreon is a shop owned and managed by individual people just the same as the grocery store in this respect and they decide selling this product makes our shop look bad or makes us seem disreputable as management therefore we won't allow it on the store shelves despite the fact that it would earn us money they're making an ethical decision as well as a PR decision as well as a public relations decision the public perception decision they are making an ethical decision patreon lost money by kicking out sargon they did it because they think it's the right thing to do and that's fine to remember they make more money from one guy like Sargon than a thousand people like me I think they make more money from Sargon than 10,000 small people like me right but patreon plays a really positive role in my life and it's really changed the way donor driven politics and filmmaking and content creation works and if you think patreon is so bad ask yourself this question why did YouTube themselves utterly fail to play this role that patreon has played why isn't Google Corporation playing this role why some other entity rise up to play this role in a limited way Kickstarter did for sure patreon has competition from Kickstarter I could fund a book project illustrating a story book through Kickstarter that is true but patreon again for those who are willing to make the commitment of time and a kind of accountability just having this kind of interaction with their audience patreon is a tremendously positive step forward compared to being with the Republican Party and asking for donations or being with the Green Party and asking for donations or being with the Communist Party and asking for donations believe me both of my parents donated money to the Communist Party this is a segue to the next little cue anything I'm gonna do here um to donating money getting nothing back you have no sense of where the money meant went or even even if you're donating money to pay for someone's lifestyle so that they can afford rent and food and to live it's their salary were you up you have no feeling of where that money is going so the old days of political campaign finance or a really incredibly bleak hustle compared to what we're now capable of doing by page one and this stuff it's all politics baby it is all just as political as running for mayor I'm not talking about purely artistic projects on patreon there are people are just painting beautiful pictures they just want you to donate to to paint a picture so now we're talking about here this is all political sargon of akkad is political jordan Peterson's political me and my channel and you'll see even more in the year ahead what I'm doing is political these are political donations and there's no doubt that patreon is a kind of political grocery store it's only comparable to a grocery store in one respect because the groceries on the show they're selling really our political change so I got a comment from someone using the name Raiden or Ryden he comments the problem I see is blatant bias against conservative ideas I think these platforms are exhibiting cowardice by caving in to the disproportionately vocal social justice warriors when you boycott them you're showing the SGI doubles the SJW social justice warriors you're showing that they are not representative of the real world okay so I disagree with this as you as you can guess what I say in reply is the principle being tested here is simply a ban on one hate speech and to abuse and bullying those are the two principles here being tested in terms of service right you're you the guy I'm disagree with your item you are implicitly admitting that conservative ideology requires or entails hate speech and bullying as defined strictly speaking by patreon policy whereas non conservative ideals do not cross these lines think about it think about what you're saying this dispute is about people like sargon of akkad being guilty of hate speech and this other category it gets less vague when you read the fine print of being abusive and bullying towards other people in Internet why do conservatives need that why are you saying this is biased against conservatives it's because of the real content of your ideology and the real form of social and political change you're pursuing which is hateful and violent abusive now here's the kicker please note I'm reading Mike reply here please note that I am an anti-communist and I'm a very vocal trenchant critic of communism past and present but you have to admit communists on patreon do not seem to have these problems this is something interesting for you to face up to hmm so I did a quick google search and I was able to find examples there's one called the communist current I'm sure I would find it morally despicable in the same way that I find neo-nazis morally despicable communists come on the internet and make excuses for mass murder they justify Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and Lenin and the massacres those people committed they present an economic ideology that I also find immoral so on and so forth but there's nevertheless something interesting here it is possible for communist extremists to come on patreon and behave themselves within the limits of these Terms of Service the form of censorship that patreon impose on you the standards and practices that are required to have your product on the Shelf of this grocery store there are communists were able to do that but for some reason you conservatives really have a problem conforming to a rule against hate speech and a separate a separate rule against abuse and bullying why is that why is it possible for people to use this platform to preach the ideology of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong which I despise I totally reject them to disagree with why is it that they can make their case within these rules and you can't make yours there's something for you guys including sargon of akkad to look in the mirror and face up to
talk positively about why I think patreon is a good thing to really extol the virtues of patreon with absolutely zero irony the caveat there being I think it's worthwhile to talk about when patreon is used correctly and when it is used incorrectly and you'll see why I use such such seemingly objective sounding words I think there is a right way and a wrong way to use patreon as a crater we're gonna wrap that up in just a couple of minutes before we get into it I think I will reply verbally to a few of the comments that's come into a the video immediately prior to this one one person wrote in to me saying quote I don't quite understand why an intermediary like patreon has to exist person a likes the content that person B produces and wants to financially support them why does person C even need to be involved why is there need to be an intermediary so I think in this video I'm going to give you an answer that question um the level of trust you need to have the level of commitment you need to have to just take money put it in an envelope and have it disappear into a black hole just take money put it an envelope and send it to the Green Party or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and get nothing back get nothing back no news no update no proof of what has money that is a huge huge huge leap for people to make and there are some causes that inspire that kind of commitment I'd say an easy example would be save the whales save the elephants where you can go out and give a rousing speech and show a short documentary clip and say hey this is us helping to nurse this elephant back to health and providing you know some kind of habitat some kind of enclosure for this elephant to live in donate your money now to help to help orphaned and injured elephants like this very a moving very emotionally evocative appeal for donations some people will step forward take their money put it an envelope setteth you or if you just provide your banking details that will send you a bank transfer and expect nothing in return now you can guess even from how I'm phrasing this I don't think that's a good thing I don't really think that's a positive side of human nature I don't think that is a positive side of the charity industry I think it's quite dangerous and really self-destructive for a lot of the people involved and what patreon offers you is a much more porous transparent meaningful and interactive relationship between the donor and the person or project being funded so even for something like a book project you know if you say okay donate money I'm gonna write and it will straight this book and then publish it the ability for the donors to stay in touch with you you could put up a daily update or a weekly update I upload a lot so most of my patreon subscribers they're getting multiple multiple messages per day on patreon I've just been a mass uploader really the whole last five years not worth getting the why but maybe it's once a day or maybe it's once a week hearing from that person you haven't the opportunity to talk to that person say okay well we just had a conversation with the illustrator we're trying to get the illustrations ready for the book we ran into this roadblock this illustrator at first was really confident but then when we started going into detail about the three-dimensional perspective we wanted for these illustrations they seemed like they weren't confident doing it we're gonna talk to another illustrator by the way this is not a hypothetical example I went through this exact process trying to get an illustrator lined up for a children's story book I'd written that's that's in comparably different from an incomparably better than the bad old days of just taking your money putting in an envelope and sending it off to some political cause and then never hearing back now if it's the example of publishing a storybook how satisfied or dissatisfied would you be if you donate money and then five years later the storybook materializes you'll probably be angry and disappointed even if the book turned out great or what if it turns out not as you had hoped maybe the book is kind of mediocre like well I'd imagined it looking like doctors ooh and instead you know the approach these guys took not what I was hoping for with this book well if you have something like patreon and let's say the book project takes five years everyone involved in supporting you is hearing about and interacting with you step-by-step as you go through these disappointments and setbacks they're seeing you make the decisions strategic and artistic and aesthetic maybe their ethical decisions - like oh yeah yeah well at an earlier stage he thought it would look like a dr. Seuss book but then this happened and this happened started working with a new art artist and it ended up having more of a Disney look let's say that your book ends with you but they will have felt involved and included and at least they had the ability to complain at least they had the ability to quit even maybe they had the ability to ask for a refund I don't know you know this type of porous interactive transparent social media platform makes the whole culture of giving and receiving something much different than it ever was in the past and I had the experience in the bad old days the bad old days before the internet the internet just barely existed title movie 1998 I remember in the bad old days how awful it was to even have to ask for donations for the Green Party of Canada there were people asking me and it's like look if I donate money to this political party what's gonna happen to the money and what do I get what's the reward okay you can preach to me some abstract karmic notion of doing good in the world I'm not interested in your philosophical abstract idea of karma I want results I want outcomes I want accountability I want transparency and yeah what that kind of interaction I want to feel like my donation matters in my opinion matter is my perspective matters and even if things go wrong I want to be there with you seeing step-by-step what went wrong and why so patreon is a really powerful really meaningful transformation of the donor recipient relationship this I've already explained most of what I have to say when I I now add the Kabat if it is used correctly now when is it used incorrectly showed it to haenyeo mania who have no respect for under this heading I signed up and donated money to hennya of she kind of bullied me into it said okay and yeah I'll sign up for your patreon group when I signed up for haenyeo manias patreon if you don't know who Hania Mania is she used to be a vegan activist now she's like an international travel and lifestyle blogger who doesn't do vegan activism at all but she used to be a being an activist I signed up for her patreon and I was looking at a blank screen nothing absolutely nothing no talking to the audience no direction and as an apology you got this message saying hey now that you join my patreon you can use this link and join my special secret Facebook group where I interact with patreon supporters like to compensate for the fact that she was aware that her page round was a desert it was just empty there was no effort into it so then I clicked on that link to Facebook same thing dead empty was a desert it was a Tundra and there was nothing there she'd be no effort so if you donated to her patreon you get nothing absolutely nothing the people who support me on patreon they got all kinds of stuff good bad or indifferent I mean just just yesterday we recorded a 24 minute video in response to one of my patreon supporters asking me problems about her personal life and I you know we really sat down and took 24 minutes that to answer this question so Sun is just a personal emotional question I get sent in Suns it's a political question I do a lot of in-depth quality interaction with my audience and they also just get updates about what's going on in my life like for a couple of days I didn't upload any videos it was only a couple of days because I was busy flying to France taking care of my daughter and recovering from jet lag so they get some sense of interaction on going all the time so be patreon in its format and what it provides is a really really positive thing and guess what that's implicitly admitted by these so-called free speech critics of patreon because what they say in their critique is that they want to do the same thing as patreon they want to compete with page runner they want to replace patreon they just want to create a version of patreon that reflects their political priorities good luck you can try you can have a right-wing patreon you can have a racist patreon it's already been done I read there's a website called hate Rhian with an H so it's a pro hate Pro racist version of patreon so who but this is not really a criticism of the function of patreon it's at a positive appreciation of the function of patreon is just a complaint that they want a version of patreon with a different political bias or with a different ideological agenda they're not even criticizing the idea of patreon having an ideological agenda ok so another comment I was going to reply to someone objected to my my comparison of patreon to a grocery store I said look grocery store has to make decisions are we gonna have this politically offensive magazine for sale we're gonna have pornography for sale and a grocery store will make the decision not to carry pornography even though they could earn money they could maybe make more money by having pornography on the store shelves because it makes the grocery store look bad so someone wrote in disagreeing with this which is reasonable you can have your your own opinion and he says no patreon is only a payment processing service so it is not reasonable to compare them to a grocery store this is more like a bank shutting down a pornography store on the other side of town or something it's not comparable to a cross restorer refusing to carry porn now this is my reply I said no patreon is a shop owned and managed by individual people just the same as the grocery store in this respect and they decide selling this product makes our shop look bad or makes us seem disreputable as management therefore we won't allow it on the store shelves despite the fact that it would earn us money they're making an ethical decision as well as a PR decision as well as a public relations decision the public perception decision they are making an ethical decision patreon lost money by kicking out sargon they did it because they think it's the right thing to do and that's fine to remember they make more money from one guy like Sargon than a thousand people like me I think they make more money from Sargon than 10,000 small people like me right but patreon plays a really positive role in my life and it's really changed the way donor driven politics and filmmaking and content creation works and if you think patreon is so bad ask yourself this question why did YouTube themselves utterly fail to play this role that patreon has played why isn't Google Corporation playing this role why some other entity rise up to play this role in a limited way Kickstarter did for sure patreon has competition from Kickstarter I could fund a book project illustrating a story book through Kickstarter that is true but patreon again for those who are willing to make the commitment of time and a kind of accountability just having this kind of interaction with their audience patreon is a tremendously positive step forward compared to being with the Republican Party and asking for donations or being with the Green Party and asking for donations or being with the Communist Party and asking for donations believe me both of my parents donated money to the Communist Party this is a segue to the next little cue anything I'm gonna do here um to donating money getting nothing back you have no sense of where the money meant went or even even if you're donating money to pay for someone's lifestyle so that they can afford rent and food and to live it's their salary were you up you have no feeling of where that money is going so the old days of political campaign finance or a really incredibly bleak hustle compared to what we're now capable of doing by page one and this stuff it's all politics baby it is all just as political as running for mayor I'm not talking about purely artistic projects on patreon there are people are just painting beautiful pictures they just want you to donate to to paint a picture so now we're talking about here this is all political sargon of akkad is political jordan Peterson's political me and my channel and you'll see even more in the year ahead what I'm doing is political these are political donations and there's no doubt that patreon is a kind of political grocery store it's only comparable to a grocery store in one respect because the groceries on the show they're selling really our political change so I got a comment from someone using the name Raiden or Ryden he comments the problem I see is blatant bias against conservative ideas I think these platforms are exhibiting cowardice by caving in to the disproportionately vocal social justice warriors when you boycott them you're showing the SGI doubles the SJW social justice warriors you're showing that they are not representative of the real world okay so I disagree with this as you as you can guess what I say in reply is the principle being tested here is simply a ban on one hate speech and to abuse and bullying those are the two principles here being tested in terms of service right you're you the guy I'm disagree with your item you are implicitly admitting that conservative ideology requires or entails hate speech and bullying as defined strictly speaking by patreon policy whereas non conservative ideals do not cross these lines think about it think about what you're saying this dispute is about people like sargon of akkad being guilty of hate speech and this other category it gets less vague when you read the fine print of being abusive and bullying towards other people in Internet why do conservatives need that why are you saying this is biased against conservatives it's because of the real content of your ideology and the real form of social and political change you're pursuing which is hateful and violent abusive now here's the kicker please note I'm reading Mike reply here please note that I am an anti-communist and I'm a very vocal trenchant critic of communism past and present but you have to admit communists on patreon do not seem to have these problems this is something interesting for you to face up to hmm so I did a quick google search and I was able to find examples there's one called the communist current I'm sure I would find it morally despicable in the same way that I find neo-nazis morally despicable communists come on the internet and make excuses for mass murder they justify Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and Lenin and the massacres those people committed they present an economic ideology that I also find immoral so on and so forth but there's nevertheless something interesting here it is possible for communist extremists to come on patreon and behave themselves within the limits of these Terms of Service the form of censorship that patreon impose on you the standards and practices that are required to have your product on the Shelf of this grocery store there are communists were able to do that but for some reason you conservatives really have a problem conforming to a rule against hate speech and a separate a separate rule against abuse and bullying why is that why is it possible for people to use this platform to preach the ideology of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong which I despise I totally reject them to disagree with why is it that they can make their case within these rules and you can't make yours there's something for you guys including sargon of akkad to look in the mirror and face up to