The dystopian spectacle of streamers

There's a cottage industry of creators and audiences watching others torch their potential on empty, solipsistic games (or sleeping with 1,000 people)

Some of you live in a dream world, and a depressing one at that

"In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment." —Christopher Lasch

I recently saw a video of a Twitch streamer playing "Through the Fire and Flames" at 200% speed on Guitar Hero, a feat that took him 9 months and 50,000 attempts to achieve. It’s an achievement in the strictest sense of the word, but to what end? It’s solipsistic, publicly performed spectacle. A perfect artifact of the mouse utopia we inhabit, where streaming embodies the worst of it, alongside TikTok and Instagram. We’re going to explore this more because it’s bigger than just this one streamer, the behavior is inculcated in our culture. It’s a warning, and slowly degrading our humanity.

This gentleman is clearly a capable and talented person. And yet, all that time, all that effort spent in a training simulation instead of reality. Many sit watching others live through movies, documentaries, Instagram feeds but never start their own projects. This man on the other hand did achieve something, but what? A paint by numbers version of speed-solving a Rubik’s cube: impressive, sure, but does it serve humanity or himself to dedicate nearly a year to it? How many people are doomed to funnel their creative, dexterous energy into single-player puzzles streamed for the world to gawk at? And are we truly this bored to watch? It’s gain of function spectacle, can you invent something so distinctly insane to entertain the rest of us?

Sorry this is crass but it’s where we end up if the “let people enjoy things” crowd runs the world. It’s obviously not this extreme for everyone …yet

Commenters to me replied: “if it makes him happy, it’s fine,” or, “let people enjoy things.” He’s obviously free to do what he wishes, and you are free to watch. We are also free to comment. Society decays when we become so permissive we give everyone a trophy for any unique or strange thing that ticks boxes the spectacle asks and algos endorse. This doesn’t necessarily lead us anywhere good. A world run by attention slot machines and no one pushes back, or better yet people get upset if you do critique - you couldn’t write darker (or dumber) science fiction. Still to me, none of these things are original in any meaningful sense of the word, they’re feats of strength to gawk at, a circus sideshow to watch what someone torched an obscene amount of life on. Then we click to the next thing. The transcendental replaced by mimetic mundanity and stupid dances. The light of real human creative potential dims.

Gaming in moderation is of course fine. But 9 months of effort to produce nothing? It’s bleak. In that time, he could have written and recorded an entire album (although few left have the mental ram to enjoy such a thing uninterrupted). And yes, once you learn to play a real instrument, you absolutely can start to compose. The skills are connected, it’s learned helpless to think you can’t. Getting proficient at original creation feels different, it’s freeing in a way that doesn’t doesn’t require affirmation. Instead, we have a man locked in a digital treadmill, repeating the same inputs endlessly, with no external impact, no authentic output, just empty spectacle. A soul trapped in a digital cage, scratching at the walls for attention. This is the tragedy of the attention creator. And make no mistake, it’s not just one person, I see this sort of thing all the time and it’s broadly applauded. Many do something similar spending hours editing videos on a tiny screen, for a similar reward. I normally think dystopian science fiction is bad, and prefer the Star Trek-esque utopian ideals to aim for. But this is one area the show Black Mirror gets right.

In a sense, many streamers are a form of Bing Madsen from Fifteen Million Merits

Here, watching someone this good at Guitar Hero is the gaming equivalent of an adult riding a bicycle with training wheels through a child’s obstacle course with rocket boosters on. It’s cartoonish, and the aesthetics are bad. Adult women are turned off. You’re supposed to take the training wheels off. The goal isn’t to master the fake world but to use it as a stepping stone to the real. You’re not meant to stay in the training sim forever, you’re meant to venture into the wild.

What’s worse is the reaction, which serves as a form of encouragement for others to follow a similar path. As if effort alone justifies the thing itself. We’ve decided grinding away at something for attention is inherently noble, we should all admire Mr. Beast counting to 100,000 in order to ‘make it.’ It’s not just that we live in mouse utopia, that’s bad enough, but that anyone celebrates it. This is equally true of most reality TV performances, that’s just in a ‘professional’ setting, but the same level of maturity and cultural contribution. It will all be quickly forgotten, because the audience is just addicted to what’s next.

Real craft has become an anachronism. We’re turning into a society of docile, domesticated animals performing as sideshow amusement to distract from death rather than transcendental beings creating timeless works that make us feel alive. Meaningful work frightens and confuses people. They don’t know how to process it. It requires too much patience, too much maturity. The world just doesn’t care, as we are not serious people. Maybe that’s been true for awhile now, but internet culture used to be more of an escape from this pop hellscape. And, it’s not fully the youth’s fault when the adults are narcissistic and instead of mentoring others or lifting the next generation up, they prefer to die clutching the levers of power.

Everywhere, we see spectacle over substance. Mindless novelty for its own sake. It’s why Hollywood keeps churning out sequels, why nostalgia is endlessly milked, why people remain mentally stuck in the places they stopped growing years ago. Why take on something weighty and timeless when you can just consume infinite variations of the same sugar-filled, low nutrient thing? The world’s blankiest blank. And why even play video games yourself (in moderation) when you could watch someone else do it? It’s not really so different from watching pornography instead of experiencing intimacy with a real human, a similar ill of our time, afflicting the same people who applaud this. When AI robots arrive things will get worse.

There’s many stories like this, and they all same essentially the same things. It’s a concerning trend no one really cares about.

Young people now aspire to be influencers and streamers, seeing it as an aspirational life - performing digital feats of meaninglessness for an audience that will instantly forget them, producing artifacts that will leave a future, more evolved civilization perplexed. The few doing long form philosophy or history vlogs etc are of course a different animal, and if you aspire to that, I fully endorse. But most of this space is not such cerebral things. An entire generation is being funneled into the dopamine drip of spectacle. Some even go so far as to record high numbers of sexual partners in a day, and many celebrate it. We don’t celebrate alcoholics or compulsive gamblers, but the difference is paper-thin: both are endless loops of consumption and repetition, feeding nothing but the addiction itself. Chasing arbitrary high scores of fake competence hierarchies without questioning why they matter. It’s emblematic of so much, similar to the optimization bros who don’t really know what they’re optimizing for.

This post isn’t about Guitar Hero. Play the game, enjoy it. But if a game can lead you to real music, to picking up an instrument, to creating something lasting, that’s the point. Same with anything else. If someone opened a blank Word document and typed the words of Moby Dick as fast as possible while recording it, people would now be impressed with this more than someone with the actual ambition and drive of writing a new novel. They’d get orders of magnitude more attention and clicks. Why? Because most have the aesthetic sense of a child, and similar values. They think novelty is the point. Many humans aren’t much better than goldfish in this regard. It’s all a dumb exploit of our evolved instincts for novelty detection. Now that survival and spotting threats on the horizon aren’t all-consuming tasks, many just don’t know what to do, and so this novelty seeking became an attention hack. And without standards, without aesthetic, without values, things devolve. We’ve lost benchmarks of beauty and status. We see likes and impressions as the end goals. Even full-time pros in ‘creative’ industries just churn out tired sequels and pop slop. It’s all terribly boring. The internet has just become another dismal and depressing high school popularity contest, and even made the nerds participate. We used to know better.

Maybe you shouldn’t stay on the smug and cynical side of pretending cultural rot doesn’t matter? Depression, honestly.

Effort isn’t the metric. Neither are eyeballs. Creation of transcendental work is. Something that lasts beyond the 24-hour algorithmic churn. Something that resonates across time, that provokes spiritual meaning. Real skills you can apply to the wider world. You don’t get there spending your life trapped in the box of someone else’s mousetrap, sequestered from the real.

We’re sleepwalking into a bad timeline and too many of us are complicit. If there is no standard, everything is permitted and nothing matters. And in a world where people celebrate a man torching nearly a year of his life on a plastic guitar, it’s clear that, for many, nothing actually does.