Comment by nimih
2 days ago
That's a pretty lazy analysis. As an easy counterpoint, no one pays to look at Facebook or Instagram posts, but both Meta and (at least some) individual influencers are able to run profitable businesses based on that media consumption (and you could say the same of some bloggers in the late 00s/early 10s, for that matter). More speculatively, I think there is also an argument to be made that even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization, especially in this age of tentpole franchises and granularly tracked personal behavior.
Influencers are, by definition, advertisers - and a particularly insidious, ugly bunch at that.
If we go by the vibe of this thread, it's yet another reason to avoid social media. You wouldn't want to reward people like this.
As for the broader topic, this segues into the worryingly popular fallacy of excluded middle. Just because you're not against something, doesn't mean you're supporting it. Being neutral, ambivalent, or plain old just not giving a fuck about a whole class of issues, is a perfectly legitimate place to be in. In fact, that's everyone's default position for most things, because humans have limited mental capacity - we can't have calculated views on every single thing in the world all the time.
Yup, for every person who takes pride in being a strong influencer, they depend on a number of people who take pride in being highly influenced.
>even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization
At a certain point you're just making the argument that any lack of action directly opposing something is "allowing it to thrive", making anyone directly responsible for everything.
Not technically wrong, but at a certain point there has to be a cutoff. Can you really hold yourself responsible for enjoying a movie which is problematic because one of the batteries in one of the cameras used to produce it was bought from a guy who once bought a waffle from a KKK bake sale? The "problematic-ness" is there, no doubt, but how much can you orient your actions towards not-benefiting something you disapprove of before it disables you from actually finding and spreading things you actually do like?
I don't find it fair, nor in good faith to claim my argument is lazy. By downloading the media of the artists who's behavior your find abhorrent, but who's art you enjoy (and you can separate the art from the artists), you can assure yourself to some degree that they are not receiving monetary gain. People who were interested in the Harry Potter game (but didn't want the author to finance) simply pirated the game. Roman Polanski, R Kelly, and many others artists are exploited in this fashion.
I do agree that the consumption of that media could very easily increase its cultural strength.
Even in your influencer example, there are ways to bring less traffic/ad views to that content while allowing some ability to consume. example here: https://libredirect.github.io/