Serious and boring answer: Calculus probably

Less serious, more interesting answer: Memes 101

A cross section of sociology and semiotics, chronicling and deconstructing the fascinating rise of modern memes as a living form of communication. I think there’s enough meat there to warrant serious scholarly analysis. Most of the students would sign up thinking it’s an easy joke class, and get tricked into learning about how ideas evolve.

It’s not a question of stress, it’s a question of soul-sucking. Pulling out what makes you, you. Wearing that persona in all your frequent streamed behavior, especially when it’s ostensibly “you” to begin with, definitely warps your mind over time.

If you wear the mask all the time, it starts to cling. You start to become the marketable character.

The unique thing is the way it directly and fundamentally interacts with the worker’s personality. Yes charisma is broadly useful in any industry, but this is the industry that is selling the charisma itself. The personality is the product.

Same. Systems dynamics, mathematics, physics and metaphysics, etc. If people have tried to devise a system to explain everything, I’m interested in looking it over. I gotta know at least the basics of basically everything.

Wrong story, more like “Tekeli-li”

LaVeyan satanists aren’t deistic, they don’t actually believe in Satan.

Thanks, I just got this out of my head

I think sales touches on it, but still the persona you adopt is a “sales representative”. You are selling a product, your insincerity is locked to the product, with a few curated pithy anecdotes to flesh out the role. It’s closer to acting. You’re using charisma to make the sale, but you still take your hat off at the end of the day. You interact with a few individuals over the course of the day, and likely never see them again. If you do have an ongoing relationship with clients, it’s one-on-one and segregated. And you can choose how much you want to rely on a persona, you can do sales from a position of relative sincerity if you actually believe in the product.

With streamers, their identity is the product. They aren’t using charisma to sell cars or vacuum cleaners or medical equipment, they are selling their personality. A sales representative doesn’t have to change their being when market research demands a change in product. If a streamer wants to change their product, they have to change themselves, or at least their persistent persona. Because it isn’t one-on-one and segregated, they have to be their persona all the time for thousands of anonymous commenters at once. It’s fundamentally existential. You can’t do it another way, it’s endemic to the industry

Steaming may be soul-sucking in unique ways

Yes, that was the entire claim. No one said other jobs don’t suck out your soul. The only claims were that there is a way which is unique to streaming, and that it’s basically universal in the industry. No one’s trying to negate the fact that other jobs suck.

They really aren’t. I’ve worked quite a few different kinds of “real jobs”, and my soul was not sucked out. Maybe I put on a bit of a mask in customer-facing roles, but that’s temporary. All my customer-facing roles involved making myself a sort of blank company representative. No one cared about me or my identity, just my ability to navigate the customer’s demands of the business.

No “real job” has ever made any demands of my actual personality or identity. I was never judged on my opinions. I never had to modify my personality to cater to critics to secure income. That is a unique struggle of streamers. You can compare and contrast the physical difficulty or monotony of other jobs, but that wasn’t the claim. The claim is that streaming sucks out your soul in its own particular way.

I don’t have any further context, but he’s got a point.

Sure, physical jobs are physically demanding and the monotony can be taxing. Even customer service jobs are mentally and emotionally taxing, but at the end of the day you’re just a rando in a uniform. You’re selling your skills and labor, you can be yourself off the clock.

Streaming is selling your personality, your perspectives, your values. With lots of viewers, you’re exposing yourself to criticism for every opinion you express. You basically live every day with your identity under the microscope of thousands of anonymous critics. Either you deal with constant character attacks, or you commodify your personality until it’s basically unrecognizable.

“Real jobs” don’t really attack your soul in the same way, because your soul isn’t the product. Aside from certain kinds of celebrities that are basically streamers anyway, it is a pretty unique struggle. At least actors are portraying characters, and can separate themselves from their roles. Streamers are the roles. The line between self and curated content is pretty heavily blurred, it really is a singular kind of soul-sucking.

I dunno if I’d call it a “trap”. I believe there is one mega-soul, splintered throughout space and time into every consciousness. I am the splinter that exists in my particular body, you are the splinter in yours. The conditions of our bodies and our experiences color those splinters in unique ways.

Yeah, the fragmented oversoul will continue to experience the world into the future, but it won’t be through the eyes of this body, through its particular frameworks and perspectives.

Like yes, the soul deep down is the same, but I am a unique perspective of the soul, and I would like to have experiences and achieve things. Zen enlightenment is peaceful and all, but it’s boring. If we were meant to be perfectly accepting of unity for eternity, we wouldn’t have emerged into the material plane in the first place.

I started because I used to follow a 28-hour day and would wake up at 6:30, look out the window, and wonder “Which 6:30 though?”

Right, which is exactly what makes the middle period of existence, while brief, extremely appealing.

Uh, it’s pronounced “inn’it”

Ch-ch-ch-chia?

Everything seems more like a gamified Alan Watts lecture than a proper game, from what I’ve played, but you might count that.

Yup, once I figured out I could tag users I started doing that instead. Much better to be prepared than to just choose blindness.

Generally I’m a bit more specific though.

Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

yes!

There’s your problem. Just because an author writes a book with a world building premise does not mean they fully endorse the world created. In Stranger in a Strange Land, which came out less than two years later, the main character creates a free love hippie movement. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a few years later, is about a revolution against authoritarian oppression.

If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers … then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.

Heinlein wrote thought experiments. He wrote about the relationship between people and the society they live in. To that end, he wrote about a number of different kinds of society, and how people related to them. Insofar as you could ascribe any particular political ideology to him based on his writings, he was broadly anti-authoritarian. Nothing remotely close to a Nazi.

Uh, curious where you got that from, especially since I don’t see how you can be both a Nazi and a libertarian. Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

You should read Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. This is basically the main theme