It’s been yet another wild week in the crumbling empire that is America, with Hurricane Milton carving a path of destruction through Florida before the southeastern United States could even fully take stock of the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in late September. Many evacuated before Milton struck, but others decided to hang back… and create content. This is self-evidently bad! But don’t expect platforms like TikTok to learn anything from it. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about why.
We begin the episode by discussing the latest basically-Persona game, Metaphor: Refantazio, which is – at least, so far – Metaphor Re(ally)fantastic. It’s Persona in a Shakespearean fantasy setting with a lot of friction removed. Chris posits that this might be the Persona-adjacent game that manages an Elden Ring-style breakout, and I think he might be onto something.
Then we talk about an issue near and dear to Riley’s heart: Netflix canceling shows after a single season and basically foisting responsibility for their success or failure onto viewers like you. After that, we grapple with the viewership-at-all-costs model of platforms like TikTok and how it has incentivized content creators to cling to their homes – instead of evacuating – during a potentially-deadly hurricane. Lastly, we brainstorm potential video game cameos for our mascot: the Aftermath Aftermug™.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can hurricane-proof Aftermath and ride out the ravages of climate change while doing the most dangerous stunt of all: blogging.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Riley: I’m gonna sound like an old man: In this age of smartphones, we do have this insight into the effects of natural disasters and other occurrences that we didn’t when I was young. You have so much more of this first-person accounting that doesn’t come from TV stations, and I think that’s really valuable. But this seems kind of like a different version of that? I can’t remember seeing anything similar. I don’t know if it’s maybe just that both the hurricanes happened at once, so it felt like a vibe. I’m sure that this has happened in other situations, but I feel like I haven’t seen it like this.
Nathan: When we were talking about it in Slack, I likened it to storm chasers, who purposefully dive into the eye of the storm. So it’s always been there. It’s always been something that human beings do. But I think the difference is, that was a niche pastime.
Riley: Oh, we should find out what happened to Caroline Calloway.
Nathan: I already did. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. PEOPLE reached out to her, and she texted back “I lived bitch.” Which, on one hand, we’re not going to learn the right lesson from this at all, given that that’s what happened, but on the other, in isolation, is kinda funny.
Riley: I’ve never interacted with her content directly, but I’ve somehow been sucked into reading so much about her. But if you asked me “Who is she? What does she do?” I wouldn’t know how to answer.
Nathan: This is a typical way that things happen with influencer metas, right? One thing becomes the meta, and everyone jumps on it. On Twitch we’ve seen that with, like, hot tub streams and things like that. In this case, it was obviously the hurricane. And then you have people who become the face of the meta. It usually crystallizes really quickly. This time around, it was absolutely Caroline Calloway. If you search for “Hurricane Milton” plus “influencers,” half the headlines have her name in them.
It’s so illustrative of why people do this. You have a chance, if you’re an influencer and something like this occurs, not just to bolster your numbers, but to get all this mainstream coverage. To suddenly get exposure to an audience you didn’t have before and become a name everyone knows [and, in Calloway’s case, to promote her book] – which unlocks tons of new opportunities down the line. It worked! And then she gets to add this coda to it where she says “I lived.” This could not have gone better for her.
Riley: It’s very strange. We don't know the extent to which it was true, but with [this] and the Adin Ross thing [where he jokingly offered people $30,000 to livestream the hurricane], the idea of doing something dangerous and streaming yourself doing it seems very stupid. You could argue that that sort of thing started with Jackass, but those people were trained stunt performers.
Nathan: It was also a small handful of people doing it, whereas now, because anyone could become that person. Or well, I don’t think that’s true. But there is a feeling, there is a sense that is perpetuated by these platforms, that anyone could become that person. So you now have masses of people doing it as opposed to the cast of one show or a handful of storm chasers.
Chris: If we’re talking about Jackass, “trained” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Riley: At least some of them.
Chris: Yes, some of them. Skateboarding is sports and is training for eating shit. I will say that there is craft to the Jackass thing. There’s a safety crew. It’s very much television. Not everyone is going to get a contract to be on a show like Jackass. In fact, I would say very few people will. But you can be on your phone and put yourself in a dangerous situation and get immediate feedback and possibly money.
Riley: Here’s a question: I remember how Jackass had the big warning not to recreate it, but now you see streamers [or TikTok challenges], and there is an implicit kind of “You should try this.” What changed? Why are we told not to be the Jackass guys but we are told to be the streamers?
Nathan: I think the facade has dropped, because I think that disclaimer was always, at best, a lampshade. It was never actually going to dissuade anybody.
Chris: But I think also, there was a kind of culture panic around children that I think has now unfortunately shifted toward the far-right. Homophobia, groomers, etc.
Nathan: Yeah, the trans panic and all that stuff.
Chris: [Dangerous stunts] are not where people are worrying about their kids now. They’re worrying about cultural issues. Does MrBeast have those [“don’t try this at home”] markers? I haven’t watched one of his videos in a minute.
Riley: I guess to what extent is MrBeast aspirational when his videos rely on having millions of dollars?
Nathan: Part of the aspirational fantasy of MrBeast is becoming somebody like Mr Beast. Having the means to make anything happen. There are steps on that ladder that you see in other content creators’ posts, too. Even in this particular case, one of the things that stood out to me – and this is from a thread by Rebecca Jennings, a great culture reporter at Vox – is a video of people using hurricane videos to show off their wealth. To be like “Look at me, I’m wrapping my luxury car in plastic to make sure that it doesn’t get damaged by the hurricane.” The point of this is not hurricane preparation. The point of this is to tell everybody that you have a really nice car. So much of social media is often that, is often ways of saying “Look at my success. This can be you, if you just follow me.”
Chris: But also the MrBeast thing is being the guy who wins a million dollars. It’s a game show. It’s game show shit.
Nathan: I also think that within all of this is a kind of broader lowering of standards, alongside plausible deniability, in that you have all these platforms that usually claim they have rules against reckless self-endangerment, right? They’ll ban you for, for example, and this even happened this week on Kick of all places: Somebody got into a horrible car accident while streaming on Kick. They got banned from the platform.
Riley: They got into a car accident? Christ almighty.
Nathan: Yeah, in a $200,000 car. The person who did it is a known piece of shit. I have no sympathy for him. But anyway, a lot of platforms say they have rules against this kind of thing, but their rules are purposefully vague. So you look at something like driving a car and getting into a wreck. Yeah, that definitely counts. But does staying in your home [during a hurricane] count as self-endangerment? Platforms could easily make the argument that, no, it doesn’t. You’re staying at home. That’s the safest thing in the world.
You can’t get them on that. If somebody gets hurt, you can’t really point to “Well, I was incentivized because I would have gotten views for it.” Most people will just respond “No, that was your choice.” It’s a very American mentality. TikTok is not an American platform, but the way we think about all of this is. “That’s on you.”
But the incentive structures that are baked into all these platforms are what’s actually motivating people to behave this way. You can’t make an argument that directly points to that such that there are real consequences for any of these platforms. So they’ll keep benefitting off this as long as they’re able. Views will always be the metric because it works so well to get people to keep innovating and creating novel forms of content – that also escalate things in ways that are dangerous or harmful or that push people further to the right politically, or what have you. But they’re not gonna change, because why would they? This is exactly what they want.
