YouTube is scaring me again. This time it isn't the comments. I've been looking at some game reviews, and I've been following Doctor Who, and there were a couple of skeptical videos there, mostly on Flat Earth nonsense.
And now my recommendations are stuffed to the gills with videos explaining why "SJW's" destroyed AAA games, science fiction, and science.
Okay, sure. Maybe I'm seeing all this because it is true. Maybe, somehow, the reason Mass Effect Andromeda failed as a game wasn't the bugs or the wonky animations or the crud story or lethargic voice acting, but because they just had to add some gay characters. Oh, sorry. The critics aren't saying that. They are saying something much more reasonable and smart. They are saying all of the above was the fault of some guy who was hired only because he was gay and black and a coptic Christian and was born on Tuva (efficiency, what?) rather than the competent, coincidentally-looks-just-like-us guy that would have done the job right.
Maybe the least organized conspiracy in the universe suddenly convinced a whole batch of different creators to lose their bonuses and, eventually, their jobs as studios went crashing down, by cramming in "Social Issues" (finger quotes not optional) where they didn't belong.
Yeah, no. Even if this bizarro world was actually real, is is a more attractive one than the one in which every time someone tries to slip in a protagonist who isn't a buff, unshaven cis-white dude with a flat American accent the howling mob descends on us all.
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There are intersections. The skeptical and atheist communities have a surprising cross-over with, shall we say, a certain level of intolerance. I think this traces right back to the problem of Engineers; they have a toolset that is so good at solving one class of problems, and it deludes them into thinking they can as easily solve all problems. Seeing the logic errors of Flat Earth belief is one thing. It doesn't give you the understanding of sociology and anthropology to understand why standardized tests are a poor proxy for anything else, or what the term "rape culture" actually meant.
And there's the noise factor. YouTube has always demonstrated the anonymity effect of the internet; everyone is a troll in the dark. It doesn't take a majority of people to make the majority of videos, any more than the number of Wikipedia editors equals the number of Wikipedia readers. The other intersection here is that the kinds of people who get upset because society is evolving and market-sensitive creators are evolving along with them are also the kinds of people who have time, disposable income for recording hardware, a base aptitude with technology and an existing interest and participation in that particular conversation on that particular social channel.
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So, no. I don't think it is a majority opinion that The Beeb randomly got a religion that demanded they base a Doctor Who episode around Rosa Parks. (How, exactly, is this more significant, much less more abhorrent, then basing an episode around Vincent van Gough?) Or that the end results are uniformly horrid and have murdered a wonderful thing.
I'm not even sure it is a majority of produced or circulated videos. I think this is largely a matter of the algorithms noticing that the echo chamber that wants their Science Fiction to go back to what they imagine was being written in the 50's is also interested in games and greco-roman history and in the popular pastime of skeptics making fun of Flat Earthers.
But it is annoying. It is even scary. I'm scared now whenever I click on a fresh channel, or something off the usual subject within a channel I'm already enjoying, I'm going to get treated to another white dude in his 30's ranting about Mary Sue characters.
And with each click, the algorithm hums softly to itself and zeroes in to the heart of that echo chamber of nonsense.
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