Comment by ericmcer
2 days ago
Influencers as the future of culture is not great. Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class? If you watch an interview with Mr. Beast or other famous influencers they are concerningly ignorant, have little self-awareness and a child-like approach to reality. It makes total sense given these are teenagers who were lauded with fame for entertaining other teenagers on social media.
I watched the Mr. Beast episode of David Letterman's show, and I had no expectations but figured he must have some charisma as the most watched youtube person. He was unable to explain basic concepts, had no self-awareness, and generally seemed detached from any sort of reality. It was shocking to think that is who is shaping young peoples minds.
“but it at least had some... class” Not if you’d have asked the WASPs at the time, they very much looedk down on Hollywood. Saw it as vulgar and beneath them for many of the same reasons people dislike MrBeast. The 'class' only came afterwards.
The movie industry was, for much of the 20th century, split between production in Hollywood and finance in New York. Probably the last gasp of that was Marvel, where, for a long time, the merch and comic people in New York made the final decisions.
Which is weird cause it's all but certain MrBeast will be president in the near future. But maybe they just don't view the president as classy?
> Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class?
It looked that way because they had media training and their public personas were carefully managed, with staged interviews and media appearances. Behind the scenes, it’s a different story.
Influencers are rewarded for seeming authentic. Mr Beast coming across badly in a traditional TV interview just makes his audience think he’s more real.
Yes you're describing class.
I would disagree. If you have no class in private, you have no class.
Hollywood actors being vapid idiots is a trope, or rather reality, as old as Hollywood. Every time they go on Letterman they have to carefully follow the script written for them to avoid embarrassing themselves and the industry. And they often fail at that.
BTW, actors are very often prostitutes. Have been since ancient times and the association has stuck. Mediterranean yachts are packed full of C-lister actresses/hookers. Not to mention most of them get jobs by sleeping with producers, which is just an indirect form of prostitution. I don't know about you, but classy is the last way I'd describe Jennifer Lawrence sucking Weinstein's dick.
I think things like "classiness," "grace," and "tact" are all but dead, both in Hollywood and across the population. Everyone seems to be mentally teenagers, but in middle-age bodies.
I understand this sentiment. When I look at my own life, one culture constant has been the decline of "formalism" -- dress, language, jobs, inter-generational relationships, privacy. If anything, the average YouTuber is a pretty average person -- not too good looking, not too well coached by a PR team, not too well dressed. Isn't this a cultural "win" because we are getting more authentic content, instead of ~10 major TV networks and film studios deciding who we should watch?
Yep. But give it a few decades for the money to figure out how to wall off outsiders, insulate their little cadres of influencers and firm up networks of fake and real methods to direct popularity.
Still - probably better than Hollywood in the long run, and more accessible, even in the hellish direction it will undoubtedly go.
To use anecdotes of specific influencers or even to cultural short/med-term memes misses the OP’s fundamental point in saying
> “this is the future of culture”.
The point is that the future of “culture” is increasingly decentralized; that the ability or more aptly, the opportunity, to accumulate “cultural influence” will tend towards higher entropy as a direct repercussion to the proliferation of the means to accumulate it.
Put differently, as the hardware and software used to record, store, and share content become more widely accessible, anyone with the access and motivation to use the tools truly has the opportunity to become famous.
When I was a kid, I used to world WWF (World Wrestling Federation) with my best friend. We loved the interviews (pre/post "fight"). Those guys were idiots and certainly "detached from any sort of reality", but also very funny to 10 year old boys! I also liked Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. I turned out just fine.
'Class','taste' etc these are all very subjective. One could argue that Mr Beast built all of his fame from scratch and didnt have it handed to him or having to sleep with some powerful gatekeeper - something you can't say about all your 'classy' hollywood stars. If you go back a century you can probably find people kvetching about the lack of class of these new fangled movie people compared to the theater stars of their day (who actually had to know how to act)
And how is this is different from movie stars?
A lot of movie stars seem very intelligent and quite conscientious people to me. The directors even more so.
> Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class?
Hollywood took a bribe from the tobacco industry to make smoking "cool" and infect our nation with cigarettes.
> have little self-awareness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mpUxn7NybY : "A big opportunity for us is that there are no gatekeepers. There's no one I have to convince to let me do things."
:-)
> Hollywood took a bribe from the tobacco industry to make smoking "cool" and infect our nation with cigarettes.
I think the whole world took up smoking because of Hollywood.
For actors it was "took a bribe" for influencers it is modus operandi.