Shred

No, Adobe, I will not switch to the genuine Adobe app. I will keep stealing from you for all eternity.

no, really!

like there is something uniquely liberating from the mindset of "I do not belong here, I am not qualified to be doing what I'm doing" than watching the richest man in the world, one who is somehow still heralded as a genius by many, be the biggest fuckin clownshoes jackass on the planet. like, when somebody shows up in my field and acts like this dude, they don't... get jobs, y'know? or they do and they are pretty swiftly let go because it's clear they have no actual idea what they're doing

and yeah yeah there's all that shit we can say about how billionaires happen at all and they're immune to this sort of scrutiny because of socioeconomic standing, but that's really not what this is about. this is about how it's so easy to see just how much he sucks ass. he's huffing his own farts daily. you see it in how he treats so many things he says as a mic drop moment only to be met with total silence. you see it in how every time things don't go his way, he just launches right into outwardly directed anger, as if everyone else is the problem

he is a man with no introspective qualities. the things he is allegedly a genius at are the kind of things where he's either being granted credit for the work of others or the kind of things where the only real notable thing is that he's reached a critical mass of either financial or social capital and that's influenced "success" along those lines. it is genuinely hard to believe I don't belong or am not good enough when this dude fucking exists the way he does

One of the peripheral details discussed in the video is that "I watched a documentary, passed clips of it through a filter, and then re-narrated the same information, often verbatim, over that footage" is a pretty effective plagiarism grift under YouTube's current mechanisms. It's interesting that one of the documentaries prominently exploited in this way is Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019). This is interesting because F:tGPtNH is, itself, a fundamentally untrustworthy documentary, despite being broadly factual.

Much has been made of the fact that two Fyre Festival documentaries were released almost simultaneously, the former being a Netflix release, while the latter, Fyre Fraud (2019) was a Hulu release. What's frustrating about this state of affairs is that (a) the Netflix documentary has been much more widely seen because Netflix has a lot more reach than Hulu, and (b) that the Netflix documentary was co-produced by Jerry Media (also known as "fuckjerry"), one of the most prominent participants in the promotional and influencer campaign that made Fyre possible in the first place.

The Netflix documentary is best understood as an image laundering operation for Jerry Media specifically and for influencer marketing more generally. It's more slick in just about every way than its counterpart, and includes a larger number of salacious claims, but is quite a bit less informative. By contrast, the Hulu documentary provides a lot more context and more clearly explains who the various people being interviewed actually are and what their roles were in both the lead-up to the disastrous festival and its aftermath. The Hulu documentary is also the documentary that actually interviewed Billy McFarland.

It's quite natural to scoff at HbomberGuy's video by saying "anyone who thinks anything on YouTube is true deserves what they get," but there are layers of misinformation in the modern media landscape, and it's not always the case that the plagiarized writing can be trusted, either. Netflix, in particular, appears to be releasing a lot of documentaries that seem to be exercises in image/reputation laundering, so even "professional" documentaries on major commercial platforms require increasing levels of media literacy to properly contextualize. This makes their gormless plagiarism by hacks that much more dangerous.