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On Online Entitlement (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-01 00:32:58
Imported:
2026-06

Content

unpacking my thoughts on online performance through the burning of an innocent sacrificial lamb

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There will be more main channel videos more often goign forward

Files

On Online Entitlement

unpacking my thoughts on online performance through the burning of an innocent sacrificial lamb Aug 11 Toronto Liveshow Tickets: https://comedybar.ca/shows/youre-not-god-i-am https://www.patreon.com/cjthex

Comments

Conzeit

man that was hillarious. You can continue to ignore us or close the patreon if you want or do whatever. it's the Cj the X thing to do. if you do something that bores me I'll just get off the patreon and I bet you wont even notice lol

Lionel Kentler

As someone who commented something out of the same subconscious feeling of betrayal on your patreon announcement of the live show — to the point where for a moment I was afraid I would be the sacrificial lamb, I needed to hear this. “If you want things, make them” I will. And i won’t be intimidated out of it by how incredibly quickly you were able to translate your thoughts into this caliber of writing and video. Thanks CJ, for the gift

annadante

didn't expect the two wolfs that I have in me: coding and fandoms to collide in such an interesting way.

Macy Allen

Couldn't get past the part where you said code is numbers and letters. There's symbols in code too. Trust irrevocably shattered. In all seriousness, great critique. Parasocial relationships are a weird animal. At some point or another, I think most if not all of us have had a deep feeling of betrayal from an artist whose work we admire failing to do something we wish they would do. It's a good practice to sometimes do a little system reboot. Does the show make me wish I was in Toronto and able to see it? Yes, because I admire the artist's body of work. If the show ever comes to a location that is geographically and financially feasible for me to travel to, will I see it? Absolutely I will. If that never happens, will I be sad to have missed it? Yeah, FOMO is a real thing too. But is it a personal slight against me that the artist's show scheduling didn't cosmically align with my life circumstances? Nope. Sometimes you get to see stuff you want to see, sometimes you don't. I can always rewatch Stranger Things and the Meaning of Life for the 8th time and continue to milk every bit of nuance and understanding out of the art I've been freely provided already.

Robert Lasica

Ngl its been enough time that I forgot that you make great video essays. This is probably the best channel update vid on the platform.

silentcrystaltears

of course the first cj drop in half a year is on my birthday hell yeah

what what

was surprised to see the comparison to open source, but it was very apt. it’s crazy how often I’ll look through the issues or feature requests for a project only to find them filled with angry demands (sometimes on behalf of companies!) as if they paid anything for the software they’re using. in software I think it’s even more silly than in other media: I could never make a youtube video that captures the same essence as what you do, but you could absolutely learn to write code and add a new feature to some software. the only solution Ive seen to stop people from being awful to open source maintainers is to make the systems so obtuse that only those with experience in them know how to interact with it. I think that same paradigm is what keeps some of the old internet alive, blogs and irc and all that. it makes the barrier of entry just enough that you have to actually care to get in. that has all its own problems though anywho to conclude, you dont owe anyone here shit and toronto seems fun maybe Ill visit

phil e the theyby

I love Nguyen’s breakdown of the elements of trust. I feel like I’m weirdly detached from that sort of trust, which I guess is why I’m not a huge “fan” of anyone in particular. I guess I expect quality and sincerity from CJ, and steadfastness (but less in the sense of “will keep making YouTube videos” and more “will keep doing things that align with their values”), but if those don’t happen, I wouldn’t say I feel betrayed. I’d more just feel like, 1) I hope they’re OK, and 2) maybe one or both of us just changed in what we value, so we don’t “click” anymore. And like, that’s OK? People change, and sometimes they become less compatible, and that’s not a bad thing. I think I’ve been treating a lot of the ideas on YouTube like open source code; things that I take with me and tinker, tweak, combine, and mold to help me show up in the world as the kind of person I want to be. I love that way of engaging, and I don’t feel any of these creators owe me anything. Over time I realized that, for all the value I get from these videos, a lot of folks on YouTube have to struggle way too hard working “normal jobs” or trying to grind the algorithm. And I want them to be able to get off YouTube for a year and a half if that’s what they need, and not have to work garbage jobs they hate. So to me, I just see Patreon as an ongoing way of saying, “you made cool things that have made my life better, and I appreciate that you did that.” No further videos, or content, or anything, necessary. Am I alone in that? It seems like a lot of creators feel like they “owe” their Patrons something, so there must be some portion of the audience who don’t see it the way I do, and do think they are paying to GET something through Patreon. But it may be that those folks are just a vocal minority. I kind of assumed a lot of folks on here think about this the way I do, given that CJ clearly isn’t dancing for the YouTube audience’s bananas.

saba

whatever

EnvyDragon

I'm glad to hear that you're feeling more empowered to do random videos on whatever the fuck you feel like, AND that you don't feel obliged to follow trends or appease the masses or whatever. Passion is interesting, selling out is not! That said, I would pay you 50 dollars to watch Arcane to the end of episode 3 and give your honest thoughts, because there are so few things that give me joy in life anymore and seeing people realize "oh my god, this show wasn't actually mediocre in the first episode, they were just lulling me into a false sense of security" puts gasoline into the hollow that was once my heart and gives me a convenient place to huff fumes from The juxtaposition is a joke, the money is not. The gasoline is a metaphor.

Sarah Sarah

The whole outro got me. Loved the “thank you” for watching, loved the deactivating Instagram bit then playing video games, and I’m glad to be a fool you have betrayed lol I hope other creators see this and know that they don’t have to bleed themselves dry for the expectations of their audiences.

alex L

been in a creative slumber recently, highly relate to your experiences re: the JP vid and taking things too seriously to the point of exhaustion. this new video, like your other ones, felt like someone grabbing me by the arms and shaking me awake. walked away wanting to make art and have fun. i'm making art right now. ta

Lucas Regis

shock and awe as I realized this is a fully-edited main channel video (wow!!!) I feel a little guilty for being part of the "wish I was in toronto" choir. "which you'd know if you saw the show, which you won't, because you don't live in toronto" made me laugh really hard though the talk about trust in art had me thinking about how interesting it is that an internet celebrity making location-sensitive content outside of the internet would be considered a breach of aesthetic steadfastness. of course, youtubers are generally dissuaded from bringing up the place that they physically live in (out of fear of DDoS, and also because it's just good business to go as international as you can) but a side-effect of that is that it hides the fact that youtubers are real people with real homes. they can't be "local" artists, they're automatically international artists, supposed to be everywhere. do people do this sort of thing with like, pop stars? comedians? I'm glad that you're coming to brazil so I don't kill myself (hah), but it's not like I expect a canada-based artist to randomly start a tour in brazil. I guess when they're really really huge and doing a worldwide tour or something. it's interesting that the internet has just destroyed this stage where new artists are simply "local artists".

Kiara

16:14 Have you heard about the self-poisoning of the open source library faker? Its SUCH and interesting story about open source and how it Functions in CS. colors.js and faker.js have thousands of dependent projects and have been downloaded BILLIONS of times, and the creator didnt want to be doing "unpaid work for fortune 500s" anymore. Ironically, i found out about this while installing the faker.js package at work,.,.,.,, LOL. There are so many interesting schemes programmers have used to try and get paid for their free work, and it can cause real rifts in the community. I think there is a little bit of capital T Steadfastness Trust in the CS mythos of Completely Free Shit Always that can Feel Like Betryal. Even tho like, They SHOULD be supported for their Work!!! That should be allowed! Immich is a free open source google photos replacement that i am in a discord server for and HOOO BOY i have been seeing a lot of @ messages about Responding To Community Feedback On The Pricing Scheme. RAAA i need to find this article, i am sure verge has good coverage but Cory Doctorow could have Excellent coverage. AH [here is the link to the reporting on faker! Warning: it does become an ad for their whatever security product, but it touches on the un-sustainability in OS](https://www.sonatype.com/blog/npm-libraries-colors-and-faker-sabotaged-in-protest-by-their-maintainer-what-to-do-now). Man open source is so weird sometimes. It reminds me a lot about the discussion of early computer science culture that Lanier talked about. AND about the blunt experience of the first chapter of Life in Code. I live in such a different culture as a "programmer" in 2024. One of Fireship videos, constant meetings, and slack channels. GOD i need to re-uninstall slack from my phone FUCK. Adding Open Source is Not About You, githubs article on open source sustainability, and Working In Public to the To Read List.

Chandler Sterling

Baldur's Gate 3 after credits scene is huge! The slot machine mentality can't find me behind my 60 hours of save scumming to get a good Persuasion roll so my companions like me just to restart the game and make a new character because one cutscene just wasn't hitting right

ellen

cj the x slow democratic reform through incremental change believers don't give up hope. remember the barbie corporations and art poll.

catalystcomet

I found myself having a reaction to your reaction to their comment, and a big takeaway for me there is reminding myself that it's not my responsibility to manage the emotions of others, it is only my responsibility to choose the kind of person I want to be. That's a constant work in progress for me, and for the better. The thing is, the first thing I thought about when I saw the announcement for the show was hoping that I would get to see something like that in person someday, which is kind of amusing in its own right because I have no idea from one day to the next if I'm going to feel like a socialite or a shut-in. But as the video progressed I found myself feeling bad for that person because their comment so easily could have been me. I would have probably thought I was being fair enough; considerate but also self-affirming, and then you would have rightfully wrecked me. Do I feel my reaction would be rooted in some parasocial relationship? No. Do I think it would have been rooted in my unstable reactions due to childhood trauma? You betcha. You went hard on this one and that's totally okay because it's not your responsibility to manage the emotions of others, it's only your responsibility to be the kind of person you choose to be. I have experienced feelings bordering violation when having expectations I'd never agreed to being placed upon me, even having achievements looked over in favor of another person's idea of who they perceived me to be. It's usually in very personal relationships. It's difficult to express the level of hurt which accompanies a loved one's disappointment in who you are when they choose to compare you to their expectations of who they thought you were or ought to be. That level of rejection can scar a person significantly. And so with all this reactivity, I had to look at my shadow, because that's always fun when we get triggered, right? Yeah. But the thing is, I'm not sure i could've gotten upset with that person having an expectation of me, without having an expectation of them first. I have to not only expect them to perceive me in a certain way, I have to be invested in it. Perhaps it was a boundary which was drawn overtly, perhaps it was a perceived understanding of how they saw me in their own way, perhaps it was the fact that they were actually awful the entire time and never deserve to have perceived me in the first place. Who knows? My point is that I had to think about my reaction to your reaction to the commenter's reaction, how intense it was, and why. What is it that I saw in the exchange that I am either not allowing myself to have, or more than likely (knowing me), engaging in? So while I feel like nobody asked, I still feel compelled to write this. Nobody asked any of us really, we just kind of started talking and that's how beautiful things can happen if we push ourselves into the uncomfortable spaces which allow a change in perspective. Maybe someone will get something out of what I have to say in a similar way I got something out of your response to another person's response to your announcement of having something to say. I do want to add though, I feel like they were almost mocked for sharing that you guys were their favorite artists. I thought that was kind of shitty. None of us can know where a person is in their life to dictate what should or should not be a favorite art form or artist of theirs. Even if we do know from our perspectives where they are, it's still shitty. I've had so many favorite artists in my life, and I can look back now and think wow, what an idiot I was, and who knows maybe that person will do the same. But I do know that we don't have any inherent right to shame someone for the art that's meaningful to them. I can say personally, the work that you, Noah, and Greg means an incredible amount to me. I found you guys independently and I guess you all found each other too, and that was inspiring to me. When other people have passed judgment on me for my interests, it can have the effect of disengaging me from that state of mind that was allowing the art to have a positive effect in the first place. Standing on a platform accessible through privilege and publicly passing those judgments on a stranger isn't a representation of one who advocates for community, that's just being a dick. Have I been guilty of being that dick? Absolutely. Have I been guilty of it recently? Yesterday. Am I doing my best to call myself out when I realize I'm feeling justified shaming another person for their chosen aesthetic representation? Usually. When I catch it. I can say that I always justify it with I perceived knowledge that I somehow see them better than they express themselves. That my expectations know them better than they do. Anyway, that's all. Nobody asked, everybody might ignore this or dog pile, or love it or I don't know, but I do know that my reaction is going to be based on my expectation of how I thought they would behave. But it's not their responsibility to manage my emotions, it's only their responsibility to be who they chose to be. They don't owe me anything. Just like you don't owe us, and just like we don't owe you. The best we can do is respect one another's boundaries, agency, and try to not be dicks.

רועי שילה

Wanted to watch past lives forever now I have an excuse

más

You’re surprisingly the second artist I’ve seen in the span of a week with the situation of their project not being meant to reach a wider audience. Your response to it helped me make sense of the “loss” I felt with the first.

Just Connor

this is completely unrelated and maybe i missed something, but what happened to the kti branding on cj's website and on the patreon it now just says bookclub instead of kti bookclub, just curious

רועי שילה

Just realised this is CJ’s way of making an update video

Ervin Pepper

Part 3 about open source verbalized something that I have been thinking about a lot, and I now feel like I have a concise way of explaining my philosophy regarding how and when I interact with online creators. Every time I make a comment online going forward I'm going to ask myself, do I want to be signal, or do I want to be noise?

yennik arual

frank ocean fans need to see this

Megan S.

Trying to decide if I have a relationship of non-trust or distrust with your seat's commitment not to spill your drink everywhere

Seoyoung Park

My blood ran COLD when i saw the screen cap of my comment… i was like 👁️👄👁️ is this show abt me….

alex

bg3 ending so real on a more serious note, my mom and i have been reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. it's an easy read by a social psychologist who's written more controversial things that i'm not entirely sure how to feel about, but once you kinda move past your reflexive You Don't Know Me feeling you get whenever someone older than you writes about your generation, there's a lot of good stuff. i know cj's done a lot of work on the performer/audience relationship, but as soon as he said "slot machine," a couple things made more sense. the slot machine as i perceived it had more to do with likes and retweets and comments on your *own* content, but the slot machine of parasocial relationships is another thing entirely. like, even when someone's streaming, sometimes it breaks the immersion for me when i remember this dude's literally talking into the void while doing whatever. but also there's a shitton of people in the chat constantly talking, and every so often one of them gets called out for a comment or for subs or whatever. idk how twitch works. the engagement farming we as fans or community members do is different than engagement farming a content creator might do. something haidt mentions is the prestige associated with likes and follows, and how social media hooks on to the parts of your brain used to using prestige as a heuristic for navigating social hierarchy. i think that Betrayal is part of that compulsion to solicit prestige by proxy whenever you're in the chat/leaving comments/etc. or something idk. maybe the prestige factor got upped because now there's exclusivity? maybe that's too heinous to a chronically online audience? i mean now i want to go to toronto because i know whatever will be presented will be fascinating and stimulating and funny but also as the internet currently is i think the idea of prestige being *for* a person's community *despite* being online feels like being excluded from tag on the playground. all this despite the very real knowledge that we as humans have and use social capital for ourselves in our own irl communities!! tldr cj committed the sin of being perceived online while also asserting their presence in their own human community. to the gallows.

pol

Fuck Yes. Thanks for this! Nice timing too.

Olive Nicole

Sometimes I hear a phrase and I immediately know it’s gonna change the way I think and talk forever, maybe I’ve already had the concept in my head and needed words for it, or maybe it’s unforgettably new. “Electric boredom” is something I needed words for and it has officially entered my vocabulary

BestStressed

Something I think doesn't get acknowledged enough is that social media has this asymmetric quality where when a person posts something on social media, they usually mean it as a broadcast, not aimed at any one person. But when a person reads something on social media, there's a natural psychological impulse to read it as a personal, one-to-one communication. The classic place I see this a lot is where one person will post something like a summary of something they've found helpful to them, in their life, pretty clearly just thinking it might be useful or interesting to some of their readers. But then they get back a bunch of responses from individuals saying, "well, that's just not going to work for me because of XYZ." And you can just feel the original poster thinking, "...okay? great? guess this tip isn't for you, then?" If you view a post as a broadcast, it makes no sense when a bunch of individuals tell you why the broadcast isn't relevant to them. But if you view it with the understanding that the broadcast felt to the reader like a one-on-one communication, it makes complete sense. If I came up to you and randomly made a suggestion that wouldn't work for you, it would be completely normal and reasonable for you to say, "nah, that won't work for me because XYZ." It's related to parasociality, I think, but it's not quite the same thing, since I've seen it happen in groups of people that all know each other and regularly interact in real life. On social media, we transfer the same behaviors we'd use in real life conversation to an online conversation. It's just that in the middle of a real life party, people rarely jump on a table and use a megaphone to abruptly inform everyone of a random thought they had. Our brains aren't trained to expect that kind of thing to happen. They're trained to have conversations, so that's how they try to interpret social media posts. So I can totally see how when you posted that you were doing a show in Toronto, to you it was just a broadcast announcement. But to a bunch of people, the gut reaction was that you'd stopped them in the middle of their day and personally told them that you were going to do a show but they weren't allowed to come to it. Sometimes we catch that reaction and recognize that we need to stuff it back down. But inevitably some people won't, because it's a very human reaction. I do wonder if this will become less of a problem as Gen Alpha and subsequent kids grow up. If you grow up with social media as part of your environment, does your brain automatically learn that there's broadcast and then there's conversation, and they have different norms and expectations? Anyway, I appreciate your not caring about us or this art form. Please keep doing that!

Arianne

I love you so much (in like the non-parasocial way. Idk you bro but the persona is serving 🔥🔥🔥)

Antoinette (Annie) Legnini

Holy fuck. Felt ‘took my job too seriously, stopped enjoying it, forgot how to do it’ and then ‘I read so many books I gave myself brain damage’ so hard that I had to relisten to you say that maybe 5 times. Last year I ended an art fellowship that I set such a high bar for that went through these exact phases, resulting in this year being an ‘unproductive’ art year and I don’t remember how to approach creating in a joyful way. Felt compelled to write all of this to say: THANK YOU for sharing this, my god I feel you, feeling inspired and not alone and I appreciate you, and please take care of yourself!!!!

Shy Anne

The comments on that post also annoyed me, because they invoked a feeling of in-group cringe and made me feel shameful about feeling disappointed that I can’t go to Toronto on a random Saturday. Like, I perceived the comments as entitled and unreasonable, but because my initial emotional reason to the post was 🥺🥺🥺 I was somewhat in harmony with the entitled unreasonable people, thus in-group cringe. I wish I could say my irritation with the comments was on behalf of the human person to whom they were directed, but that would be a lie! A rationalization that takes the pressure off my feeling of entitlement to your work! Never! If it was recorded I would watch it, but I don’t begrudge it not being recorded because I know if I’m at a live show or in a zoom call I prefer it not to be recorded; I like when the only people who can perceive me are perceptible to me. Recording a live show means the audience no longer gets to be an audience, they have to be The Audience of The Recording. Especially in contexts where there’s a time for questions, any time you sincerely ask a question you’re admitting you don’t know the answer. It’s one thing to admit ignorance to a room full of people, it’s quite another to do that for literally anyone with an internet connection. I hope the show goes well! Partly because I want good things for you even though you’re not my favorite artist.(I’m my favorite artist (obviously), but like Doja Cat and Taylor swift have made some of my favorite music) But I do value the art you make and the work you do to cultivate a non-shitty community! I use philosophical ideas you introduced me to often! I listened to Carousel on repeat for like an hour and a half when I had to drive through Portland, the nice 3 / 3 time signature and repetitive “everything will be all right, darling hold on tight” helped keep my traffic anxiety down, and like Be Perfect or Die was clutch for me at a hard time in my life when my mental stability was fracturing and I had to quit a lot of things for the best. So were Scarlet, Evermore, Artificial Heart, and heckin animal crossing. I drove 6 hours through the Midwest to see Doja Cat’s Scarlet tour, I drove 4 hours straight into hell on earth (Phoenix, AZ) to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, I would totally drop the cash for an Amtrak ticket or brave Portland traffic again to see you in Vancouver! I’m unwilling to live in big enough cities for artists to come to me, so unless I’m willing to go to artists I’m not gonna see live art! So mostly I hope the performance goes well so eventually you go to Vancouver, but still a little because I have trust in your aesthetic competence! Also maybe even a little altruistically, investing in local communities is like a core value for me; I think the world gets better incrementally by making little parts of it better consistently, far more than large scale changes sporadically.

cRiek

I often have to distance myself from your content because I feel too close to a personality that's not there. I believe that the pathologies are built into the platform. I'm losing hope that we can cure a system with only itself. To create content infused with an explosive personality and merely explaining and understanding the problem (I fear) is at best fighting against a wave with a water gun and at worst only perpetuating over-intellectualization and feeding the masses with more arousing content. Maybe that's too critical or pessimistic. I hope it's only me who continues to procrastinate with anti-procrastination content. I have ancestral memories of a Dionysian spirit and soul that would convict and possess people at times in the past. I can't stop thinking about it- all day and night long. It's grabbed me. I need to rediscover it. I'm not mad or hating or anything- only leaning into this crushing holy dissatisfaction with the present state of things. You're my favorite YouTuber and a genuinely inspiring and creative individual🧡. I'm just wondering how an internet that would freely and effectively share culture and information would look like. I'm hoping to work on it. We need to kill the rot from the roots- rebuild something that can fundamentally change us.

רועי שילה

The new Tyler the creator interview with springhill is really cj the x coded especially relating to this video, highly recommended checking it out

Raina Hatcher

This reminds me of the art theorist Boris Groys' "Collector as Curator: Collecting in the Post-Internet Age," a book chapter in "Collecting in the Twenty-First Century." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv24cnsjw.5) the internet breaks down all barriers of curation, muddying the lines of art and the documentation of art. Not all art is created for the internet, and thus is decontextualized by its presence on it. A show, created to be live, is fundamentally physical and temporal. It cannot exist online. It can be documented, but through its documentation the artwork becomes diluted. More people can partake in the diluted experience, but less people can (or at least will go out of their way) to actually experience the artwork in its real potency. Barriers of access are not truly broken down because they cannot be, the work cannot be experienced outside of its context. The works documentation thus only perpetuates of ever increasing dilution, and loss of meaning. (This is especially true for a live show, which is an event like an exhibition. Its total object incorporates the audience, the location, all aspects and interactions of its physical execution. Thus is cannot even be recreated physically, as the context will always change, let alone digitally.)