If you told me this is a psyop to erase people's free will and ability to make choices, at this point, I'd believe it. Thing is content creation is very much going that way. Shit needs to be slop, advertiser friendly, and short form. Long form content is dying off. Which is weird because this trend started with Vine, and Vine was amazing, you had to be funny in like six seconds. Really promoted creativity. Now shorts are just sloppa content, and most videos that get reccomended are just the most fucking milquetoast, fence sitting opinions you could possibly find online, followed up by "What do you think? I'll read you in the comments."
Of course this directly relates to Dead Internet Theory. Post COVID there's a lot less people online. Sure, more people casually engage with brainrot, but less people actually know how to use computers, or care to learn. Brainrot content is "Good enough". Normally, people go on the internet for SOMETHING. There's something they wanna learn, or something they wanna do. Companies love that nowadays, the internet is used in a completely purposeless way. You just go on, grind 2 hours away frying your dopamine receptors on brainrot, and come out, having done nothing, learned nothing, achieved nothing.
There's one generation that's mostly competent online. Boomers and Zoomers alike are cavemen, take them out of their cellphones with prebuilt auto playlists and they don't know how to use even streaming sites. It's a big part of why Netflix and Spotify can enshittify freely and see very minor losses. Asmongold bots himself to fuck. So do most big streamers. It's a whaling scheme. Phil himself is botted to the gills, dude has like 10 legit dents in chat, it's just masked by how ban happy he is and his 3 day follower only mode. It's one of the industry's biggest open secrets. 84% of Twitch users are streamers. The real audience are there to watch softcore titties baking in a tub. Luckily for them, the investors don't know or care. They are caveman-like boomers with deep pockets who only care about "Number go up".
I see people doing the most outrageous, bottom of the barrel shit, yet failing to get an audience. There's entire websites built on porn plus vidya, which sees 20ish girls baring it all daily while playing games, AND THEY GET NO AUDIENCE. Straight up tits on screen all day, 0 audience. Every single entertainment avenue online is so overcrowded, there's just no audience to go around. We're at a point where even porn, which used to be trade dignity for easy money, is no longer a lifehack, because other 10 thousand chicks are doing it as well, and it pays peanuts.
Hence, shortform content. Push the available audience around, while significantly cutting down on production time and costs, and multiply views and watch time. Genius business move. Vidya streaming is gonna completely fall by the wayside in the upcoming years. It is VERY longform content. Speedrunning might survive, and multiplayer games might too, but I don't think modern releases get any real views any more. Companies made sure of that by sending early copies to select streamers.
Ultimately I think Phil's around for the long haul, so long as he can sustain the Us Vs Them mentality. The point used to be watching a retard outrageously suck at videogames, but he's long since pivoted. Nowadays, he's a perpetual victim and as long as there is an ominous all-powerful yet distinctly weak and ill-minded collective out to hurt him, some dents will throw him their disability checks. He'll never be happy because he legit would like to be like Max Dood or Aris or whatever, but he doesn't have the charisma to pull it off, but I think he understands that it is better than working a 9 to 5. Shit, he says it frequently himself.
Thing is, he's not that much better off. I think he'd be a lot happier as Middle Manager Burnell. Fuck, he literally has Pizza Parties for his employees already. He hates having to debase himself to entertain retards. And one could very easily argue that he's below the retards he entertains, because of the nature of the interaction. It's not like he's a well respected, King Retard of sorts. He's a joke even amongst his own supporters. He's a court jester kept around to provide lols and vicarious victories over perceived bullies. As much as he says his real fans want to see him succeed, his chat pops when he's struggling, and I have this feeling that even dudes like Jayde or Derish watched him because he's about at their level gameplay-wise. Kekon certainly had to let him win when they fought. Bryan would fucking dismantle him. He's oh-so-fucking-lucky that modern EOMM is designed to make retards like him feel competent and stick around. He would have been swallowed whole in CoD or GTA lobbies in the late 2000s.
Even that one attempt at "Grill Phil" with PPP, I call him THE BETRAYER, saw him really befuddled that 'tractors legit just don't want to give him a red cent. He was talked into believing that we would bankroll his shit so he could keep doing it because he ultimately provides entertainment. I say it pretty frequently but he would much rather have us as a paying audience than the dents he's stuck with. He even quotes us when he needs to sound smart.
If he was really happy and grateful for his fans, he'd run community lobbies. Just saying. I've seen MUCH smaller channels that run community lobbies every week, and a big part of the appeal of seeing that stream is "Access to specific game on specific days." These communities are what keep 20+ year old games alive.
Not for Phil, though. He won't step on Fightcade, it's fulla tryhards dood. That's just no fun. For a former EVO champ. Who's entire streaming strategy hinges upon dunking on scrubs while the game's fresh and running the fuck away once competition gets steep.
