The vibes are bad right now. I blame the tech industry. I blame the billionaires. I blame the combination tech industry and billionaires.
With the big changes that have been happening, especially around AI, I’ve been thinking about where things go from here. Let me put on my Nostradamus hat and make a prediction real quick.
The Pivot to Video
In 2015, basically every media corporation on the planet launched its “pivot to video.” Before the pivot, people were consuming long-form text content plastered with ads on publisher’s own websites. With the pivot to video, they instead began to make everything into a video hosted on third-party platforms like Facebook. Similar to the “pivot to AI” we’re now experiencing across the…everywhere, the “pivot to video” was a nice excuse to lay some people off and make shareholders happy. (And much like the “pivot to video”, with the “pivot to AI” publishers are once again falling for big tech’s lies and are going to have a bad time.)
Just as video killed the radio star, it also killed a bunch of writers. Turns out writing long-form content and performing it in front of a camera are two different skill sets. And having your voice, appearance, and delivery being criticized by the entire internet opens up a whole other level of harassment, especially for women.
Now that we have a proliferation of AI tools that make it easy to clone a person’s voice and face and manufacture fake videos of them, putting yourself out on the internet is a whole new risk. Incel losers using Elon Musk’s Grok AI won’t give up the opportunity to generate a fake image of a person, and create as much psychological damage as possible.
As a creator, having your name and face out there helps give yourself credibility, but maybe that doesn’t matter as much as people think.
The Return to Usernames
Before Facebook came along and everybody collectively decided to ignore the parental advice of “don’t tell anybody on the internet your name”, most people were using screen names online. Even though people were using usernames in chat rooms and on forums, things were still pretty civil (assuming there was some level of moderation). People weren’t fully anonymous with a randomly generated username each time they posted, they were pseudonymous with a persistent name that carried with it a reputation within the community just as much as a person’s real name would.
Just like Lemony Snicket, Lewis Caroll, and Mark Twain, it’s possible to build an audience and reputation with a pseudonym. You still can run into this phenomenon on text-heavy websites like Bluesky or Tumblr, where there are a bunch of pseudonymous accounts with huge followings. I can imagine that as more horror stories of people getting their likeness manipulated by AI, there are going to be more people trying to escape into pseudonymity.
The Pivot to Pseudonymous Video
Using a pseudonym for your text-based productions is one thing, but what about all those other sites that pivoted to video? People going back to reading text isn’t going to be a thing, especially since Gen Z apparently can’t read. So how do you be pseudonymous on camera? Although there’s quite a few “internet celebrities” out there who go by pseudonyms, like Markiplier or Mr. Beast, they’re still recording their face and voice.
Well, in recent years there’s been a rise in people creating videos and live streaming while keeping their face and names a secret: they’re called Vtubers. Right now these “virtual YouTubers” are mostly anime girls or furries streaming themselves playing video games, a subculture of a subculture type stuff, but that could change.
The idea of a virtual persona isn’t new. Most people are familiar with virtual bands like Alvin & the Chipmunks or Gorillaz. But it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where nobody knew who Damon Albarn was except his publicist, and he only presented himself as Gorillaz band member 2-D. Like a Vtuber, the character and the performer get merged into one.
I don’t expect everybody making videos to turn into a Vtuber, but it seems like over time most subcultures become more and more mainstream. People love Kermit the Frog. Is a Vtuber that different?
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