"They watch as she draws on eyeliner and opens an energy drink for breakfast. They watch as she slumps behind a desk littered with rainbow confetti, balancing her phone on the jumbo bottle of Advil she uses for persistent migraines. They watch as she shuffles into the bathroom, the only corner of her apartment not on camera.... When Emily started streaming in 2016, her world felt impossibly small. She worked night shifts as a cashier on Long Island and spent her off hours at her boyfriend’s place, watching him play video games. At 19, she chose to save money by staying close to home and enrolling at the local community college, watching as all her friends moved away. One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: 'Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. … This could be helpful.'..."
From
"Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’ A lonely young woman in Texas has streamed every second of her life for three years and counting. Is this life, or a performance of one?" (WaPo)(free-access link, because there's a lot of material here, and I couldn't begin to quote everything interesting/horrible).
If it all feels very deja-vu, perhaps you are remembering JenniCam, which went on for 7 years and went off 22 years ago. Jenni — Jennifer Ringley — got on the David Letterman show: "He predicted that Ringley’s style of entertainment would 'replace television, because this is really all people want.... They’re lonely, desperate, miserable human beings... they want to see life somewhere else taking place.'"
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25 comments:
Leftist writers are so hilarious.
"But no one tells streamers when to record or when to stop. There are no labor codes, performance limits or regulations to keep the platforms from setting incentives impossibly high."
Labor codes! She needs to form a Union.
If your boyFRIEND tells you you have no FRIENDS and you are WATCHING him play video games... run
If you're life is so empty - that her empty life brings you entertainment... uh. Well, good luck with that.
remember the TV yule log?
in Chicago; one of the UHF stations would have a show that was a yule log burning.. For Days.
This PROVE that people have ALWAYS been Stupid
It's The Truman Show, but with lower overheads.
People still slow down when they drive past a car wreck.
"If your boyFRIEND tells you you have no FRIENDS and you are WATCHING him play video games... run"
I think that the kids call this a "situationship." The difference between girls and guys is that guys will still smash girls that they put in the "friend zone," but the girls in this kind of "male friend zone" might be even more unhappy than guys who are in some girl's "friend zone."
What's really bad is that there are 642 people who have even less of a life than she apparently does.
"They’re lonely, desperate, miserable human beings" Who they?
Does anyone go to school or study anymore?
Life is so hard that some people need other people to go to the trouble to live it. I credit it to lack of imagination.
Mind you, I watch people plant and harvest thousands of acres of crops. I watch people take watches apart, clean them, and put them back together. Something to bear in mind. Maybe I'm just not interested enough in people.
I just read up on her a bit. She's obviously attractive and very confident. I'm not sure I buy the lonely-loser backstory.
"Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily …"
At $1/day that'd be a good income.
She goes shopping and points out the trampy dresses she wants to buy. She hints that she'd need to try them on. She lets people watch her sleep. She gets gifts from her subscribers. The article doesn't say how. The streaming service that hosts her gets a large percentage of what she earns, and they encourage her to keep filming herself.
What part of this is different from porn? No sex?
"I'm not sure I buy the lonely-loser backstory."
Basically attractive women can go on the internet and say anything they want, and they will find plenty of "simps" who will express sympathy, and even buy them stuff or give them money. This was probably the actual advice her "boyfriend" gave her.
I think we can agree: if there's no sex, it's not porn.
Wilbur, I hesitate to dilate, but what constitutes porn lies in the eyes of the beholder.
you're = your. ugh - no trash can again.
Several years ago I met Jenni thru a mutual colleague. Working in the Tech field at the time. Struck me as just an average mid-40s woman who did some edgy things in her youth and looks back on it as a fun time, but all over now.
Jennicam had nudity and sex. What does Emily have to offer?
I don't quite get the "friendzone" thing. In movies and TV friends were always becoming lovers and eventually married couples. Was that unrealistic?
When attention spans have been trained down to just a few seconds via TikTok and X and Instagram, a continuous stream of one subject might be seeking only momentary viewing, again and again over time, with the power of repetition providing the primary impetus to return. And every once in a while, you see something kinda neat.
This also happens with webcams, now ubiquitous and readily viewable, from views of Mt. Fuji to African watering holes to spots on a college campus. I've been waved at by my kids at preset times while they were walking between classes in their university days. An innocent and fun item to view.
Why do they push on us these perverts, from the lonely Emily in Texas to autistic psychopath Sam Bankman-Fried in prison?
There are plenty of wonderful hard-working-parents raising happy, well adjusted, good and normal kids. But the attention goes to the ones who need meds. I don't like that.
Riding on a NYC subway, summer of 75, I sat across from an ordinary woman and her two daughters. I was disconcerted to realize that I knew her, or at least recognized her--knew what her voice sounded like, and what her kids were like. But I couldn't place whether I knew her from growing up in Montana or my years in Texas, so didn't say hello or anything. Only after I got to my stop and was walking home did I realize it was Pat Loud and 2 of her girls.
I had forgotten about the JenniCam. She broadcast everything to the world, and I mean EVERY THING.
I always figured she had a screw very loose somewhere in her head, but in these days of Only Fans it's plain she was not more than a couple of standard deviations away from the median.
Remember the documentary series "7-Up"? The group of randoms who were checkpointed every seven years from childhood to golden years? You could see the pressure to achieve something with their lives at every episode. Imagine having to account to the whole world for your life choices.
Instead of seven years, it's now more like seven hours. Instead of achieving something, they're forced to stay the same.
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