The internet is filled with content destroyers
You're online. You've noticed it too. There's a lot of haters out there.
The definition of a "hater" has certainly evolved in the nearly thirty years I've been online. At first, it was chatting with your buds about a thing you didn't like: pop music, Aeropostale polos, Mr. Mime. Then came MySpace, a personal, public front page with cobbled together middle school HTML enshrining your love for Europe (the band, not the continent), and your disdain for...Mr. Mime. Being a hater used to be a cute affectation that a middle schooler builds part of their personality on...to be trashed by the next school year and replaced with something new.
And then came the Platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ (lol), Linkedin, all the great internet holes to loudly proclaim your thoughts and piss-takes. In 2012, I generally still believed that takes and posts on the internet were typically general human beliefs someone held.
The real downfall here, the part that is ruining the internet for us all, is the rise of the Content Destroyer, the specific category of content creators that exist purely to destroy, belittle, and disparage.
I have a very love/hate relationship with the notion of being a "content creator." I think you should value the work you do, whether it's streaming, writing, video production, music creation, or interpretive dance, higher than simply content to be consumed. Maybe there's even smaller splits here—is a Bluesky post actually more than content to be consumed?—but, in general, you're more than someone who exists to create content for a platform. You're an artist, a writer, a performer, an editor, a personality. You're a person.
Not so, with the Content Destroyer though. A Content Destroyer is the antithesis (and the definition) of a content creator. They feed the platforms, shoveling in piles of calcified, compressed hatred into a flaming steam engine of rage. They are the soot-covered engineers of our current moment: a despotic spiral of fabricated outrage. Their power is, unforunately, quite real, but they are farcical to the man (and it is almost always a man)...more Mega-Maid than Death Star
You know a Content Destroyer within minutes of seeing one: they publish so much content, but make nothing. Ragebait, clickbait, rants that could be categorized by words that end in "-istic," "heated gamer moments," and manufactured outrage at their lot in life. Gone are the days when these jackbooted idiots would decide the best way to avoid all this "injustice" is to walk into the wilderness to never be seen again. We'd hear about them from time-to-time, usually when they were eaten by a bear, trapped on a mountainside, or started a forest fire out of negligence. But now? Now, they have podcasts, talk shows, streams, and VODs.
As much as I am loathe to say it, content creator makes sense to me: content creators are people making things. They are additive at best, neutral at worst. They make things to share, to grow, to laugh, and to have a conversation. Content Destroyers only bring things down, you (and your twelve year old nephew) included. They want to grab a hold of you and drown you in their nightmare realm where they never got a shot in life, where someone else "took" their spot, where their delusions of grandeur were laid bare and they ignored them. Their somehow slighted past that refuses to acknowledge the millions they hoover up by making your nephew mad.
The content a Content Destroyer publishes doesn't matter: it's all founded in the same juvenile, middle school level opinion about Mr. Mime you held 25 years ago. They never grew up, instead they watch the art around them shift, evolve, and grow beyond them and, instead of engaging with it, they hated it. How dare something force them to use their brain and reckon with their inadequacies?
A Content Destroyer is a steam engine of hate, chewing up culture and burning it in its antique, outdated engine. Many of the takes are from the era of steam trains, just packaged up as defenses of "women's sports" or "traditional living," "issues" these dummies don't even care about or lifestyles they don't actually lead. It's all fake. I expect they're all assholes in real life and probably hold most of, if not all, of these opinions. But the outrage is fake. They've most likely never met a trans person or held a tomato they've grown themselves. They probably haven't even engaged with their "fans" outside a chat box. Isolation and fear of the outside is a hallmark of the Content Destroyer, after all.
These people are millionaires. They are whiny, rich middle schoolers who never outgrew their AIM usernames. They masquerade as culture warriors, repeating the same slurs they said when they were twelve. They present as counter-culture, but are bought and sold by major corporations; their paychecks come from ad deals from shitty culture-signalling, alt-right leaning, morally-bankrupt astro-turfing companies (not to be confused with "corporations," in general), or the platforms they make home (which are also major corporations). They glom onto cultural battles like barnacles on the Titanic, then move on quickly to the next sinking ship. Attention and outrage have a half-life measured in seconds on Twitter; these people stand for nothing more than what can make them a buck.
There's a well-known adage: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Sure, the viewer is still the product: your twelve-year-old nephew watching a forty-year-old man get angry at a female character existing is the product: he's watching the ads; he's engaging. But the Content Destroyer is also the product. Platforms are pyramid schemes now. In the attention economy, he needs to get more attention.
Your twelve-year-old nephew is also more likely to spout his own bullshit on a platform, spreading the doctrine of the Content Destroyer until he, too, achieves fame as a bigot. Meanwhile, the top Content Destroyer engineers the outrage to pull more into his pyramid, a handsomely paid, but throwaway "personality" for a platform too cowardly to have standards of quality.
And after all this plays out, nothing will have been created. Nothing new will have been said. An entire architecture of shit-talkers and idiots building a bigoted pyramid of bullshit, each side honed into a slippery slope to the bottom. We still hear about them after they hit rock bottom from time to time, usually when they SWAT a streamer, desecrate a holy site, or storm the Capitol.
