The Truth is Out of Style: Veganism & Ecology in 2021.

everyone likes to quote numbers off of
social media when they indicate success when there's a youtube video that's been uploaded and it's got 1 million views everyone's really here to say look at all this success look at all this interest this shows that the movement is growing that we're winning that we're making progress and nobody wants to stop and take the time to look at and really think about the evidence of failure this is the front page of the youtube channel for direct action everywhere and they get fewer views per video than i do everyone likes to talk about success nobody likes to talk about failure the can film festival what were the most successful films at the cannes film festivals here what were the least successful films what were the films that might have been good but went totally ignored what were the films that failed for a reason and maybe we can learn something from their failure maybe examining the failures of the cannes film festival is actually much more important or more instructive or more useful and more valuable to us than just watching endless hype and promotion for the most successful films this video is about politics this video is about ethics this video is about organizing a movement right well why do i say this i'm vegan i'm also a critic of what's going on in the vegan movement and one of the clarifications i have to offer again and again is if you are a film critic it's not because you hate film it's not because you want the art form of cinema to collapse or fail right if you are a film critic you're trying to help filmmakers as individuals succeed you're trying to make films better you're trying to point out what's wrong with them there's something for all of us to learn as members of the audience as filmmakers as directors what have you from film criticism if you're doing this it's because you think criticism itself is something important and positive and constructive and i don't mean to brag i don't mean to boast but between 2015 and 2021 can you tell me anyone else who would even be my competition for the most prominent the most important the most consistent the most incisive critic of the vegan movement we don't even really have to narrow it down to say who's been criticizing the vegan movement from within because i don't think we have any meaningful incisive or important critics on the outside either so the job the task i took upon myself right it's become a very lonely one i don't think i'm bragging i don't think i'm boasting if i say that because i can't name even one other person that i can be compared to in the last five years in the last seven years you name it are these numbers bad is it a bad thing to put out an invitation for an animal rights conference and have only 432 people click on the video have only 432 people express enough interest to watch a one minute video inviting them to attend a conference you're organizing well i think you would feel these were bad numbers if you had donated one million dollars if you had donated 100 000 if you had donated just ten thousand dollars or if you were one of the people who had spent years in jail because the main way direct action everywhere claws its way onto the front page of the newspaper headlines is by putting their own activists putting their own followers behind bars in one illegal stunt after another nobody asks me what i think or how i feel about the current generation of would-be leaders of the vegan movement and for me those are two very different questions what i think about something is very different from how i feel about it i'll tell you this i criticize the hell out of gary yourofsky i've criticized the hell out of james aspie i've criticized the hell out of joey carbstrong i think all of those people each and every one of them have seen my videos criticizing them and in many cases i've heard back from them or i've heard back from them through a friend of a friend and so on we're a lot less than six degrees of separation apart right i know those criticisms reach those people and i hope that even in my harshest critique of these people you can tell in terms of how i feel about them how i feel is not that they're bad people even if they are even if i think they're bad people even if i know that they're bad people i'm telling you this right now i don't feel like they're bad people i feel like they're people who ended up in the wrong job i feel like i'm looking at someone who's a good person who could make some kind of positive contribution to society in some other role but they just ended up choosing the wrong career maybe gary yourofsky should have stayed in hip-hop he used to be a rapper did you know that about him maybe james aspie should have kept on working in tourism he used to work in ski lodges and on pleasure boats tour cruises you know what i mean all these people i used to even say about durianrider if you just stuck to repairing bicycles it wouldn't have been a problem he could have run a bike shop and fix bicycles but he shouldn't have done what he did as a leader of the vegan movement i don't really feel that i'm criticizing bad people i feel that i'm criticizing people who are doing a bad job because somehow they've ended up responsible for the wrong things i am not only willing but eager to evaluate my own youtube channel as a failure it's not a model of success it's a very interesting very instructive failure but even i can manage to get 2 800 to watch my video stating my very provocative very unpopular very challenging view of aristotle's politics so it's there are some strange little accomplishments along the way here and trust me if i had published my views on aristotle as an article even if it had been an article in a newspaper there is no chance 2 800 people would have listened to what i had to say or read what it was i had to set down in writing so how can we evaluate the failure of large-scale well-funded movements like direct action everywhere and extinction rebellion that not only have received millions of dollars in donations but that have appeared on the front page of newspapers again and again that have managed to claw their way into the headlines primarily through illegal stunts resulting in mass incarceration of their followers again and again just to quote this headline here more than 1 000 extinction rebellion activists taken to court think about the cost in time effort and yeah ultimately money somebody's gonna have to pay for lawyers to cope with this and think about what could have been accomplished in terms of filmmaking publishing research any kind of positive activism or even setting up a pancake stand that gives away free pancakes what could have been done instead and what ultimately was the point of this model of disruptive activism just to get 500 people to watch a youtube video extinction rebellion manages to get 77 783 views per month that is very closely comparable to the range of viewers i get in a normal month on my channel but i have never once been on the front page of any newspaper if you add up all the money that has gone to this youtube channel it has never reached one million dollars let alone a million dollars a year there's no comparison and i am not asking my followers to put themselves in prison in order to promote my social media career peter singer probably on the top 10 list of most famous vegan advocates even if he is an advocate for veganism i have many times harshly criticized peter singer comes out to support extinction rebellion and they got 70 views in the first six months that this was online if i simply downloaded this video added my own snarky commentary and criticism and re-uploaded it to my own channel it would get more than 70 views in the first hour jerome flynn a genuinely famous actor endorsing and giving an interview to this movement and appearing on their youtube channel click on the thumbnail now maybe not famous in the united states of america but if you live in great britain or europe you probably know who this is george mambio oh and about as famous a name as you could possibly get an endorsement from sir david attenborough i do not mean to suggest to you that this type of celebrity endorsement is in any way meaningful what's meaningful is the depth of the failure that this reveals even with mass media coverage radio interviews television interviews magazine spreads even with celebrity endorsements and all the rest of it they still can't find an audience so this is a moment for all of us to sit down and really reflect what can we learn from the decline and fall of veganism in specific and environmentalism in general between 2015 and 2021 the successes are easy to see because they're everywhere celebrated i'm asking you to take a moment and reflect seriously on what we can learn from the less often admitted depth and extent of our failure my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show live and stereo flow fill me