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The Strange Online Aesthetic of the YouTube Shooting Suspect

40 points by rhema 9y ago

canadianwriter 9y ago
Reading through her site and the like I see a lot of conspiracy - it's a theme - that things are far bigger than can be controlled - there is a secret and I am revealing it. It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Were there signs that could have been seen? Not many people saw her videos or site and if they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" and if someone suggested she seek help she might have seen it as part of the bigger conspiracy. Not really going anywhere with this comment to be honest, it's just scary and I don't see any real easy solutions to this kind of situation. There are thousands of people with similar sites, similar youtube channels that will continue. They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  been thinking lately, we might have a bias towards fear because it's better to mistake a stick for a snake than the reverse, some people's genes go too far with this and get anxiety disorders. maybe we also have a bias toward detecting betrayal, reciprocity being a big thing for mammals. humans needed to constantly track who was allied with whom in order to predict their behavior. so maybe some people's genes go too far detecting betrayal and they end up paranoid.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  Those symptoms are classic paranoid schizophrenia[1] (which is not uncommon, but many 'troubled people' have other problems). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptom...
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I don't think it's a good idea to do psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of a comment about an article about her website.
- portofcall 9y ago
  It’s a warning sign for delusional and paranoid ideation, which can be the result of a pretty startling number of issues. Drugs can cause delusions/paranoia, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, mania, and so on can all present in that way. It’s important to remember that it’s quite rare for that kind of person to be a threat to anyone other than themselves though. Most poled who think like her, or think they’re being “gang stalked” or any of a myriad of strange-to-delusional beliefs are just miserable, exhausted people, not a threat. However it’s also true that of the small number of mentally ill people who on to harm others, people with paranoid ideation are one of the two groups who are more likely to be violent. The other group are people who are psychotic, and may harm people under the instructions of “voices” or in extreme cases, just not have any idea what they’re doing. Again however, those “likely” groups are still seriously unlikely to be violent against anyone other than themselves, in general.
- grandmczeb 9y ago
  > It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.
  - canadianwriter 9y ago
    It certainly is a symptom but when you have massive subreddits dedicated to conspiracy just saying having those kind of thoughts means you should seek help probably wont help much...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- kristianc 9y ago
  > They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me. It also goes without saying that there are many other more prosaic dangers to you than a vegan scizophrenic conspiracy theorist with a grudge against YouTube. But if it bleeds, it leads, I guess.
- paradite 9y ago
  To be honest I find the content on her website pretty normal according to my standards. Only the paranoid about the dictator part can be called conspiracy but that's just a very broad idea and nothing specific. Other contents are just rants and strong opinions on issues on demonetization or animal abuse. There are far more incomprehensible and scarier content on the Internet if you know how to find them.
- pmarreck 9y ago
  We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... (Which doesn't claim that no conspiracies exist, only disputing the claim that the conspirators are hiding the evidence against them as evidence itself) I also see an external locus of control worldview. "Things are done to me" instead of "I star in my own show". That is associated with depression and possibly other psychological disorders. http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-helplessness-hopelessness-and-external-locus-of-control.html http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-he...
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    >We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy I'm not sure where you're going with this. Conspiracy fallacy is trivially observed by outsiders, and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious.
    - pmarreck 9y ago
      > and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious This assertion is tantamount to saying the entire field of psychology and psychotherapy is bullshit. That is literally all they do, talk you out of your erroneous beliefs about yourself and erroneous worldviews or habitually negative thoughts.
      - Zeta_Function 9y ago
        No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them. That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.
      - nugi 9y ago
        Well, the notion of fixing people by telling them whats wrong with them is bullshit. Lucky for us, most of psychology has moved beyond this antiquidated fruedian thinking.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-father-told-police-she-was-angry-2018-4?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Humans are logical and rational, but can be illogical and irrational in the same breadth. Sometimes people are configured less trusting, some too trusting, everyone is trying to figure out the world. Many of the things you mention, that there is some bigger power and belief being bigger than the reality, could also be applied to religious people which can also be troubling in many extreme areas such as cults or killing people that don't believe. Terrorism is largely a religious side effect of some belief that is avenging against a conspiracy. Conspiracy in a way is a religion, but some conspiracies are true and most people have seen humans be devious in small groups even at their workplace or in business, so it goes back to trust/belief as some challenge authority, some trust too much. Conspiracy has ranges just like religion but they may come from the same place, people trying to simplify their world with many unknowns or to deal with emotional issues, standing in society, trust in authority or too much confirmation bias. All of this just goes back to the irrational side of humanity and the human condition where people are figuring out their world, anything that doesn't have a least a good hold in reality, solely based on belief over common trust and facts, can go off the rails.
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  Unless you're a complete bore, if you look at someone hard enough you can make the case that they're a mental invalid. It's a useless thing to talk about, because prior to her shooting anyone yesterday, the only thing that could have warned us were just warning signs. Just as easily as she walked up to that office and shot people, she could have changed her mind and gone about a normal day and done nothing wrong. Does our society now support the idea of precrime? I sure as hell don't. It bothers me when every time something like this happens, the question is always, "How could we have caught this?" or "how can we make sure she didn't get a gun?" or "how could we have institutionalized her?" It's much more useful to talk about how to come to terms with the absolute chaos in our world and structure your life around the principle that the world is a fragile and dangerous place. Anyone can drive their car across the centerline. Any two-bit dipshit can learn how to make aluminum powder bombs and terrorize an entire city. Some crazy incel can walk up to your office and fuck your whole life up as you're leaving for lunch. This will always be the case. I don't understand why people think it's reasonable to suggest that we can ever live in a world where your mortality isn't seriously exposed, or that it would be a world that would be nice to live in. Unless you're completely out of your fucking mind, most people are incapable of truly coming to terms with it and going about their day, willing to die at any time. Everyone else is afraid, and probably always will be. I think some people cope with the fear by deluding themselves into thinking security is just around the corner, if only we can just fix a few things like gun access and mental invalids. We just need to do a few things just a little bit better, and then it's all going to be great. These people live in a fantasy world. Others cope with the fear by isolating themselves and their families, avoiding cities and anyone unlike themselves, maintaining a small circle of trust, neanderthal style. This is antithetical to classical liberal values and thus is unappealing for most young and open-minded people. If you think you reject both of these approaches, I think you're probably just in denial.
  - gebeeson 9y ago
    That is a great thought process that I agree with but haven't been able to put it in words. I ascribe it to 'hindsight being crystal clear'. Of course it is. There always seems to be dots that can be connected once 'something' happens - regardless of what that 'something' is. But until that 'something' happens, the dots are without meaning and who cares about connecting them.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others. Not many people saw her videos or site Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=en https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e... If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth. Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship." But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine. Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose. I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.
ibn_ibid 9y ago
This is a pretty bungled article and she has the causality of the aesthetics wrong - her videos don't resemble post-internet artists, post-internet art resembles them in their attempts to reify authenticity and pre-broadband earnestness. Instead of using Petra Cortright as lens to read Aghdam, the author should've examined "amateur" sites like Geo/neocities, angelfire etc or the style of Iranian music videos.
pmarreck 9y ago
Who knew Joan Jett was a stone-cold killer? (sorry) But seriously, YouTube owed her nothing. This external-locus-of-control sense of entitlement she had is ridiculous. If YT decided tomorrow to hoard all ad revenue going forward and not share it whatsoever, that is still not a reason to resort to shooting, even if you suffer a loss in livelihood. There are other providers.
gscott 9y ago
I posted some ground school videos years ago when YouTube only allowed 10 minutes of video and they were monetized making around $100 every 3 months. YouTube is keeping that money now and even though it is a small amount I feel it is unfair. I can see how this woman became really angry. There is no alternative source to monetize videos other then YouTube and now the only way you can earn an income from it is to have a huge following.
- IamNotAtWork 9y ago
  Right, I think they said your content isn't monetized unless you have over 10k subscribers and X number of uploaded videos. This makes it hard to make money off of your cat, for example, as people click and share but don't subscribe. It's also harder to have a stream of these viral videos. It's kind of sad that it went this way but I think it can open opportunities for alternatives to youtube.
IamNotAtWork 9y ago
Her site is 503 at the moment.
CryoLogic 9y ago
My YouTube channel also used to net closer to $1k/mo (about 100 coding tutorials) and as a result of frequent algorithm changes and algorithmic demonetization now nets shy of $100 per month. I am not fond of Google's censorship first philosophy, their willingness to push their own viewpoints (many times not backed by logic, reasoning or data), or the fact that they build platforms marketed for the users and than once these platforms hit scale they kill off the teams that took care of the users in favor of all-in monetization of any kind. It is very sad what happened, but for a company with such a large monopoly in search and in online user-generated video I have expected better. I can see how this person would be furious if she lost nearly all of her income to a change with no way of fixing it. To clarify, I also lost my highest grossing video to a copyright troll and YouTube ignored my support queries for 6 months before resolving it (about $400/mo lost in that time). They did not make any efforts to replace my lost income, and did not ban the copyright troll. I would have not been able to reach them to resolve it either if I just went through support. I had to send emails to support 3 times and than reach out on social media. EDIT: And after a copyright troll steals your content, even if Google re-instates it the video seems to be lower in the search results. Being #1 for a search result is basically how you make money on YouTube if you aren't a YouTube personality. After several months of your content being removed it will lose several positions when it is visible in results again. EDIT 2: http://youtube.com/devfactor http://youtube.com/devfactor EDIT 3: Does anyone fear this is how large corporations in the "gig" economy will treat the people making them money in the future? YouTube now treats creators as second rate citizens. It was definitely not like that when the platform was younger and still growing. Many people make their living on YouTube, operating as a 1099 contractor similar to how many people are now making their living driving Lyft, Uber or similar services. Once Uber and Lyft hit market saturation can we expect massive QoL declines for their drivers as well when the companies decide to pursue maximum profits since they no longer need market share?
- xapata 9y ago
  Most folks are at-will employees. 1099s should have no expectation of long term employment from a particular client. This extends to YouTube. You may get money today, but they could easily cut you out tomorrow. You don't have a "right" to post videos on someone else's website and make money.
gojomo 9y ago
Looks to me like she was always a bit 'out there' – possibly even in productively creative ways! – and wanted to be an avant-garde YouTube star. But, because of her own limits in finding an audience (or tuning herself to an audience), or simply never having a lucky lightning-strike of fame, she didn't get the attention and wealth she wanted, and simmered with resentments. Some background mental disorder(s) flared up – maybe due to some recent personal relationship or financial crisis, or drug/medication issues – causing a larger delusional/paranoid break from reality and civilized behavior. (Though, it may come out that she'd had other less-violent breaks in the past.) Her known behavior before the violence doesn't strike me as that different from lots of other histrionic online personalities, or righteous ranters (either on mass media or in online niches), many with gigantic followings.
tw1010 9y ago
I wish there was more to this article. I think it's an interesting point, almost of an @dril flavour. But all this article seemed to boil down to was "hey, before anyone else covers this, look how weird the homepage of the shooter is".
- creep 9y ago
  I agree. The author did not even bother to make their point clear (something something aesthetics something virtual illusions something personality), did not even bother to speculate as much as they hinted they might. Shame.
zylent 9y ago
It almost seems like a scaling thing at this point. If .1% of people will at some point commit a violent crime, at some scale you will have users that are in that .1%. At 1,000 users, it's only one person. At 1m users, you've got a sizeable population. As an aside, I don't see much discussion surrounding the physical security (or lack of) at Youtube HQ. Not saying this could have been prevented, but most of my employers have had some form of card access system to limit the impact of events such as this.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Google uses a card access system.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Making shooters and other kinds of serial killers into celebrities does a lot more to encourage future killers than it really 'educates' society on how to prevent it. Promoting these kinds of stories for sheer titillation purposes does more to undermine prevention of such crimes than anything else.
- neuronexmachina 9y ago
  Yup. Here's the American Psychological Association statement about a study on the topic: http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion.aspx http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagi... > “Unfortunately, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame,” she said. This quest for fame among mass shooters skyrocketed since the mid-1990s “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” > She cited several media contagion models, most notably one proposed by Towers et al. (2015), which found the rate of mass shootings has escalated to an average of one every 12.5 days, and one school shooting on average every 31.6 days, compared to a pre-2000 level of about three events per year. “A possibility is that news of shooting is spread through social media in addition to mass media,” she said. > “If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”
ambivalents 9y ago
> Critics and audiences have always been interested in the difference between an artist who seems to “mean” what they say, and one who is subverting that meaning. Does Cortright “mean” her videos, and if not, what makes them different from the “authentic” material created by Nasim Aghdam? Jesus this article. It's grasping for some higher relevance beyond what we had here: a troubled, mentally unstable woman with an online aesthetic that didn't jive with what we in the West consider normal design standards. It's not that we shouldn't be examining material like hers for patterns that could potentially prevent future tragedies like this. But this is just feels amateur and needlessly judgmental.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That's too dismissive. You may not be familiar with this aesthetic but it's actually got quite a following for the exact reasons the author mentions. So she was mentally unstable; so was Van Gogh and so have many innovative artists been through history (often due to their fraught economic circumstances). My read of this tragedy is "starving artist attacks the corporation that exploited her."

40 points by rhema 9y ago

Reading through her site and the like I see a lot of conspiracy - it's a theme - that things are far bigger than can be controlled - there is a secret and I am revealing it. It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Were there signs that could have been seen? Not many people saw her videos or site and if they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" and if someone suggested she seek help she might have seen it as part of the bigger conspiracy. Not really going anywhere with this comment to be honest, it's just scary and I don't see any real easy solutions to this kind of situation. There are thousands of people with similar sites, similar youtube channels that will continue. They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me.

nerfhammer 9y ago
been thinking lately, we might have a bias towards fear because it's better to mistake a stick for a snake than the reverse, some people's genes go too far with this and get anxiety disorders. maybe we also have a bias toward detecting betrayal, reciprocity being a big thing for mammals. humans needed to constantly track who was allied with whom in order to predict their behavior. so maybe some people's genes go too far detecting betrayal and they end up paranoid.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
blacksmith_tb 9y ago
Those symptoms are classic paranoid schizophrenia[1] (which is not uncommon, but many 'troubled people' have other problems). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptom...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I don't think it's a good idea to do psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of a comment about an article about her website.
portofcall 9y ago
It’s a warning sign for delusional and paranoid ideation, which can be the result of a pretty startling number of issues. Drugs can cause delusions/paranoia, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, mania, and so on can all present in that way. It’s important to remember that it’s quite rare for that kind of person to be a threat to anyone other than themselves though. Most poled who think like her, or think they’re being “gang stalked” or any of a myriad of strange-to-delusional beliefs are just miserable, exhausted people, not a threat. However it’s also true that of the small number of mentally ill people who on to harm others, people with paranoid ideation are one of the two groups who are more likely to be violent. The other group are people who are psychotic, and may harm people under the instructions of “voices” or in extreme cases, just not have any idea what they’re doing. Again however, those “likely” groups are still seriously unlikely to be violent against anyone other than themselves, in general.
grandmczeb 9y ago
> It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.
- canadianwriter 9y ago
  It certainly is a symptom but when you have massive subreddits dedicated to conspiracy just saying having those kind of thoughts means you should seek help probably wont help much...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kristianc 9y ago
> They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me. It also goes without saying that there are many other more prosaic dangers to you than a vegan scizophrenic conspiracy theorist with a grudge against YouTube. But if it bleeds, it leads, I guess.
paradite 9y ago
To be honest I find the content on her website pretty normal according to my standards. Only the paranoid about the dictator part can be called conspiracy but that's just a very broad idea and nothing specific. Other contents are just rants and strong opinions on issues on demonetization or animal abuse. There are far more incomprehensible and scarier content on the Internet if you know how to find them.
pmarreck 9y ago
We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... (Which doesn't claim that no conspiracies exist, only disputing the claim that the conspirators are hiding the evidence against them as evidence itself) I also see an external locus of control worldview. "Things are done to me" instead of "I star in my own show". That is associated with depression and possibly other psychological disorders. http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-helplessness-hopelessness-and-external-locus-of-control.html http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-he...
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  >We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy I'm not sure where you're going with this. Conspiracy fallacy is trivially observed by outsiders, and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious.
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    > and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious This assertion is tantamount to saying the entire field of psychology and psychotherapy is bullshit. That is literally all they do, talk you out of your erroneous beliefs about yourself and erroneous worldviews or habitually negative thoughts.
    - Zeta_Function 9y ago
      No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them. That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.
    - nugi 9y ago
      Well, the notion of fixing people by telling them whats wrong with them is bullshit. Lucky for us, most of psychology has moved beyond this antiquidated fruedian thinking.
mattnewport 9y ago
There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-father-told-police-she-was-angry-2018-4?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...
drawkbox 9y ago
Humans are logical and rational, but can be illogical and irrational in the same breadth. Sometimes people are configured less trusting, some too trusting, everyone is trying to figure out the world. Many of the things you mention, that there is some bigger power and belief being bigger than the reality, could also be applied to religious people which can also be troubling in many extreme areas such as cults or killing people that don't believe. Terrorism is largely a religious side effect of some belief that is avenging against a conspiracy. Conspiracy in a way is a religion, but some conspiracies are true and most people have seen humans be devious in small groups even at their workplace or in business, so it goes back to trust/belief as some challenge authority, some trust too much. Conspiracy has ranges just like religion but they may come from the same place, people trying to simplify their world with many unknowns or to deal with emotional issues, standing in society, trust in authority or too much confirmation bias. All of this just goes back to the irrational side of humanity and the human condition where people are figuring out their world, anything that doesn't have a least a good hold in reality, solely based on belief over common trust and facts, can go off the rails.
nickysielicki 9y ago
Unless you're a complete bore, if you look at someone hard enough you can make the case that they're a mental invalid. It's a useless thing to talk about, because prior to her shooting anyone yesterday, the only thing that could have warned us were just warning signs. Just as easily as she walked up to that office and shot people, she could have changed her mind and gone about a normal day and done nothing wrong. Does our society now support the idea of precrime? I sure as hell don't. It bothers me when every time something like this happens, the question is always, "How could we have caught this?" or "how can we make sure she didn't get a gun?" or "how could we have institutionalized her?" It's much more useful to talk about how to come to terms with the absolute chaos in our world and structure your life around the principle that the world is a fragile and dangerous place. Anyone can drive their car across the centerline. Any two-bit dipshit can learn how to make aluminum powder bombs and terrorize an entire city. Some crazy incel can walk up to your office and fuck your whole life up as you're leaving for lunch. This will always be the case. I don't understand why people think it's reasonable to suggest that we can ever live in a world where your mortality isn't seriously exposed, or that it would be a world that would be nice to live in. Unless you're completely out of your fucking mind, most people are incapable of truly coming to terms with it and going about their day, willing to die at any time. Everyone else is afraid, and probably always will be. I think some people cope with the fear by deluding themselves into thinking security is just around the corner, if only we can just fix a few things like gun access and mental invalids. We just need to do a few things just a little bit better, and then it's all going to be great. These people live in a fantasy world. Others cope with the fear by isolating themselves and their families, avoiding cities and anyone unlike themselves, maintaining a small circle of trust, neanderthal style. This is antithetical to classical liberal values and thus is unappealing for most young and open-minded people. If you think you reject both of these approaches, I think you're probably just in denial.
- gebeeson 9y ago
  That is a great thought process that I agree with but haven't been able to put it in words. I ascribe it to 'hindsight being crystal clear'. Of course it is. There always seems to be dots that can be connected once 'something' happens - regardless of what that 'something' is. But until that 'something' happens, the dots are without meaning and who cares about connecting them.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others. Not many people saw her videos or site Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=en https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e... If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth. Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship." But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine. Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose. I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.

ibn_ibid 9y ago

This is a pretty bungled article and she has the causality of the aesthetics wrong - her videos don't resemble post-internet artists, post-internet art resembles them in their attempts to reify authenticity and pre-broadband earnestness. Instead of using Petra Cortright as lens to read Aghdam, the author should've examined "amateur" sites like Geo/neocities, angelfire etc or the style of Iranian music videos.

pmarreck 9y ago

Who knew Joan Jett was a stone-cold killer? (sorry) But seriously, YouTube owed her nothing. This external-locus-of-control sense of entitlement she had is ridiculous. If YT decided tomorrow to hoard all ad revenue going forward and not share it whatsoever, that is still not a reason to resort to shooting, even if you suffer a loss in livelihood. There are other providers.

gscott 9y ago

I posted some ground school videos years ago when YouTube only allowed 10 minutes of video and they were monetized making around $100 every 3 months. YouTube is keeping that money now and even though it is a small amount I feel it is unfair. I can see how this woman became really angry. There is no alternative source to monetize videos other then YouTube and now the only way you can earn an income from it is to have a huge following.

IamNotAtWork 9y ago
Right, I think they said your content isn't monetized unless you have over 10k subscribers and X number of uploaded videos. This makes it hard to make money off of your cat, for example, as people click and share but don't subscribe. It's also harder to have a stream of these viral videos. It's kind of sad that it went this way but I think it can open opportunities for alternatives to youtube.

IamNotAtWork 9y ago

Her site is 503 at the moment.

CryoLogic 9y ago

My YouTube channel also used to net closer to $1k/mo (about 100 coding tutorials) and as a result of frequent algorithm changes and algorithmic demonetization now nets shy of $100 per month. I am not fond of Google's censorship first philosophy, their willingness to push their own viewpoints (many times not backed by logic, reasoning or data), or the fact that they build platforms marketed for the users and than once these platforms hit scale they kill off the teams that took care of the users in favor of all-in monetization of any kind. It is very sad what happened, but for a company with such a large monopoly in search and in online user-generated video I have expected better. I can see how this person would be furious if she lost nearly all of her income to a change with no way of fixing it. To clarify, I also lost my highest grossing video to a copyright troll and YouTube ignored my support queries for 6 months before resolving it (about $400/mo lost in that time). They did not make any efforts to replace my lost income, and did not ban the copyright troll. I would have not been able to reach them to resolve it either if I just went through support. I had to send emails to support 3 times and than reach out on social media. EDIT: And after a copyright troll steals your content, even if Google re-instates it the video seems to be lower in the search results. Being #1 for a search result is basically how you make money on YouTube if you aren't a YouTube personality. After several months of your content being removed it will lose several positions when it is visible in results again. EDIT 2: http://youtube.com/devfactor http://youtube.com/devfactor EDIT 3: Does anyone fear this is how large corporations in the "gig" economy will treat the people making them money in the future? YouTube now treats creators as second rate citizens. It was definitely not like that when the platform was younger and still growing. Many people make their living on YouTube, operating as a 1099 contractor similar to how many people are now making their living driving Lyft, Uber or similar services. Once Uber and Lyft hit market saturation can we expect massive QoL declines for their drivers as well when the companies decide to pursue maximum profits since they no longer need market share?

xapata 9y ago
Most folks are at-will employees. 1099s should have no expectation of long term employment from a particular client. This extends to YouTube. You may get money today, but they could easily cut you out tomorrow. You don't have a "right" to post videos on someone else's website and make money.

gojomo 9y ago

Looks to me like she was always a bit 'out there' – possibly even in productively creative ways! – and wanted to be an avant-garde YouTube star. But, because of her own limits in finding an audience (or tuning herself to an audience), or simply never having a lucky lightning-strike of fame, she didn't get the attention and wealth she wanted, and simmered with resentments. Some background mental disorder(s) flared up – maybe due to some recent personal relationship or financial crisis, or drug/medication issues – causing a larger delusional/paranoid break from reality and civilized behavior. (Though, it may come out that she'd had other less-violent breaks in the past.) Her known behavior before the violence doesn't strike me as that different from lots of other histrionic online personalities, or righteous ranters (either on mass media or in online niches), many with gigantic followings.

tw1010 9y ago

I wish there was more to this article. I think it's an interesting point, almost of an @dril flavour. But all this article seemed to boil down to was "hey, before anyone else covers this, look how weird the homepage of the shooter is".

creep 9y ago
I agree. The author did not even bother to make their point clear (something something aesthetics something virtual illusions something personality), did not even bother to speculate as much as they hinted they might. Shame.

zylent 9y ago

It almost seems like a scaling thing at this point. If .1% of people will at some point commit a violent crime, at some scale you will have users that are in that .1%. At 1,000 users, it's only one person. At 1m users, you've got a sizeable population. As an aside, I don't see much discussion surrounding the physical security (or lack of) at Youtube HQ. Not saying this could have been prevented, but most of my employers have had some form of card access system to limit the impact of events such as this.

aoeusnth1 9y ago
Google uses a card access system.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

Making shooters and other kinds of serial killers into celebrities does a lot more to encourage future killers than it really 'educates' society on how to prevent it. Promoting these kinds of stories for sheer titillation purposes does more to undermine prevention of such crimes than anything else.

neuronexmachina 9y ago
Yup. Here's the American Psychological Association statement about a study on the topic: http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion.aspx http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagi... > “Unfortunately, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame,” she said. This quest for fame among mass shooters skyrocketed since the mid-1990s “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” > She cited several media contagion models, most notably one proposed by Towers et al. (2015), which found the rate of mass shootings has escalated to an average of one every 12.5 days, and one school shooting on average every 31.6 days, compared to a pre-2000 level of about three events per year. “A possibility is that news of shooting is spread through social media in addition to mass media,” she said. > “If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”

ambivalents 9y ago

> Critics and audiences have always been interested in the difference between an artist who seems to “mean” what they say, and one who is subverting that meaning. Does Cortright “mean” her videos, and if not, what makes them different from the “authentic” material created by Nasim Aghdam? Jesus this article. It's grasping for some higher relevance beyond what we had here: a troubled, mentally unstable woman with an online aesthetic that didn't jive with what we in the West consider normal design standards. It's not that we shouldn't be examining material like hers for patterns that could potentially prevent future tragedies like this. But this is just feels amateur and needlessly judgmental.

anigbrowl 9y ago
That's too dismissive. You may not be familiar with this aesthetic but it's actually got quite a following for the exact reasons the author mentions. So she was mentally unstable; so was Van Gogh and so have many innovative artists been through history (often due to their fraught economic circumstances). My read of this tragedy is "starving artist attacks the corporation that exploited her."