Youtube Activism is OVER (James Aspey, Maddie Lymburner, Freelee, Durianrider, etc.)

so probably one of the main changes that
has happened is as you can tell from my youtube channel it's back to my name it was with my name and my ex-girlfriend's name but we have since broken up and we won't be obviously making videos together anymore um for the last part of our relationship the last year of our relationship we were in an open relationship which is a whole other story that i won't get into right now during that time i met someone else um as can easily happen in open relationships and we were open to that possibility of meeting other people falling in love with other people that kind of thing and that's basically what happened so i met someone else i fell in love and i am very very happy and um you know i feel like yeah sometimes life just surprises you i never thought that was gonna happen but i don't know what else to say about this i don't know what else to say in the year 2020 it has become common knowledge that the gold rush on youtube has already come and gone it was not obvious to anyone during that gold rush while it unfolded that that's what it was and that's all it was now i lived in laos small poverty-stricken country in southeast asia during a literal gold rush when the government briefly had a huge amount of money from gold and copper mining and i remember talking to people mostly government officials in a communist country a huge percentage the population or government officials telling them face to face look you've got this one mountain that's full of gold and copper how many mountains like that do you think you have like this this is not gonna last just five years from now this is going to be over and you're going to be back to being a hopeless poverty-stricken country and the gold is gone and the copper is gone and you've cut down all the forests and what's the future for poverty-stricken laos it's very rare to have the detachment during a gold rush while all that prosperity and optimism is surrounding you to be the voice of reason and say this too will pass okay what's over two aspects of it very briefly one when you look at the rise and fall of someone like maddie lindberner who was completely and consciously stepping into the shoes of durianrider and freely that's not a conspiracy theory she repeatedly met up with cooperated with collaborated with and took advice and direction from durianrider and freely themselves they knew each other quite well personally she modeled her early videos and her video career on durian writer and freely the idea that you could get two million views and quite a lot of money from filming yourself walking around in your underwear in lingerie or in a bikini on youtube that's over in a more subtle and profound way the potential to reach a large audience with challenging and unconventional ideas is also over even though the numbers of people being reached might have been far fewer than 2 million per video i have a very clear memory now of about four years ago maybe three and a half years ago when melissa and i were first getting together i was teaching her a lot about talking to her a lot about the assassination of both jfk and rfk just happened to be something she really had not grown up knowing about at all um she wasn't quite born into the right generation for conspiracy theories one more the other and you know i was saying to her well look some of the conspiracy some of the conspiracy theories are crazy but the real history is very interesting and the real history is not what you were told in your high school history textbook so to speak you know and so unpacking that and while we were having those discussions i was googling around and checking what was available on youtube um and at that time there was a lot there was a lot of really quality information that came up just doing a quick search within youtube for rfk assassination and uh specific things related to the jfk assassination that perspective those types of voices today are gone i'm not going to make the claim that youtube has actually deleted those videos or suppressed those videos or completely eradicated those youtube channels i wouldn't presume that but you can't find them by searching within youtube you can't find them with a google search they have been in effect removed from public view now if you go on to the right discussion forum on reddit or something maybe there people can share these links maybe the information is still being spread or maybe it's just on websites other than youtube but these are two overlapping sorts of opportunities that existed on youtube in 2016 and do not exist in the year 2020 right so the one hand there was the opportunity to exploit sexuality or other salacious content to reach a large audience and then on the other hand there was the possibility of presenting thought-provoking challenging unorthodox ideas about politics about history about health all kinds of matters and reaching a relatively large audience people like freelee and durianrider were doing both i mean the sex appeal the 90 nudity was a huge part of freelee's ascent of fame a huge part of maddie limburn's ascent of fame and the idea that you could find an audience for a niche message that might indeed be contradicted by university textbooks or high school texts might be quite at odds with um mainstream conventional wisdom might be quite challenging or unsettling and that people would come to youtube in order to hear that perspective people would come to youtube to hear something about the assassination of rfk and the assassin assassination of jfk that they would not hear on nbc news on cnn or on not even on on hbo right and when you look at the career of james aspy and his collaboration for several years with carly taylor again it was a bit of both it was trying to pursue money and fame where those two things overlapped it was very actively and very self-consciously exploiting the sex appeal of james aspie it was very actively and very self-consciously exploiting the sex appeal of carly taylor and they took it as far as they could take it but in the years 2018 2019 and now 2020 the potential there was much diminished i'd say it's exponentially less than it was in 2016 in many many ways that opportunity is now completely utterly over for better and for worse right i was out here lamenting the rise of lifestyle activism i was out here making really serious warnings about where this type of permanent vacation activism was going to lead us as a movement just as individuals what what what is we're brainwashing ourselves into there were disadvantages there were advantages also because even though there may have been some crazy crackpot videos about the assassination of jfk rk i really appreciate that i as an already educated person i could sift through that and i could find really valuable discussions i remember a really valuable discussion just getting into the ballistics of the rfk assassination which bullets matched which guns you could find really great information on youtube let's say four years ago and today you can't today it's over and all of the potential for education and mutual intellectual stimulation and new political movements and organizations and activism emerging from it is over i sympathize with james aspie he is someone who came onto youtube with one story to tell and one story only right he had cancer he became a drug addict he became vegan it improved his life there is one narrative that he has performed on youtube again and again and again but you can't have a career in just that same story being told to that limited extent i sympathize with james aspy just because he is somebody who tried to monetize his life story but with his life story having been told and having appeared on numerous talk shows and numerous podcasts and numerous interviews with the press by that same token from that point forward he is a has been his career is over and that's the sense in which social media doesn't make activists of us all but it makes creative artists of us all at some point you run out of a life story to tell and the question is now what story is worth telling