PewDiePie: Very Serious Update

Vox writes:

“Pewdiepie correctly understands that it is his Internet audience that matters, not the media, and not the gatekeepers. He provides a powerful example for Milo, and for every other independent thinker who is not going to be lifted up and protected by the SJW-amenable authorities. …

We are here to disrupt them and replace them, not to join them and work for them as creative serfs. …”

Several of us had a long conversation about this on Skype last night. At the end of the day, we need to focus on 1.) generating content, 2.) building networks, and 3.) attacking and changing the Narrative. If we are capable of doing that, then everything else will fall into place.

As Niall Ferguson argues in his new book, social media has “enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures.” These networks cut across national and organizational lines. We’re responding to PewDiePie who is based in Sweden. Paul Joseph Watson makes videos in Britain which have an impact on politics in the United States. Tim Pool is over in Sweden making a documentary which is challenging the Narrative about refugees and crime.

We don’t need Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal or David Brooks at The New York Times to tell us what to think anymore. The “mainstream” has lost its traditional monopoly on the flow of information. As this Sweden project shows, we are already capable of financing, creating, driving and spreading our own narratives with the tools we now have at our disposal. We can hire someone like Tim Pool to go over to Sweden, investigate an issue and find out the truth. In some countries, the network has grown to the point where we can challenge and overthrow entrenched liberal elites.

The only thing that matters is the type of discourse that spreads across the network. In the late 20th century, a handful of media conglomerates had an iron grip on the distribution of information. By controlling the discursive means of production (which used to be very expensive), this media elite created and spread a “mainstream” culture that came down to you vertically through your television, radio station, and newspaper. It was very inorganic in the sense that a tiny elite in the Los Angeles-New York City-Washington, DC triangle was having a massive impact on local cultures. There were even disciplinary institutions which were created to police discourse, enforce the secular norms and values of political correctness and punish anyone with social and economic excommunication from “mainstream” society who dared to go off script and breach the dominant racial etiquette.

That’s what happened to PewDiePie. The Wall Street Journal spearheaded an attack in an effort to intimidate him, police his speech and destroy his platform. In this case, the goal was to maintain the taboo around “anti-Semitism” in “mainstream” discourse, which PewDiePie was perceived to be undermining with his humorous videos for his teenage audience. The media elite tried to take him down because he had amassed such a large global audience that he was seen as a threat.

MILO’s flamboyant homosexuality was used against him for the same reason. Berkeley illustrated the damage that MILO could inflict on the liberal elite on college campuses. These people don’t care about MILO’s homosexuality which they gone out of their way to normalize. Their goal was to maintain the iron grip they have on discourse at our universities which like the media are key culturally sensitive institutions. Most people formulate their worldview as young adults. Contrary to the fanciful Enlightenment notion that humans are rational beings, it matters a great deal which ideas that young people are exposed to at that point in their lives. It usually has a lifelong impact.

By controlling discourse in the mass media and universities, the Left is able to control our culture. As many have said, politics is downstream from culture. If you control the culture, you can set the ground rules of politics. For the Alt-Right, beating the Left on campus and in media is the whole ball game.