“The Mind of Jake Paul” debuted yesterday.
I would have watched it yesterday, but my internet wasn’t set up yet. Gotta love moving.
Shane Dawson—who has been on a tear recently with his recent documentary series on Grav3yardGirl and Jeffree Star—is also someone I don’t really know or care about. (Sorry, Shane—but I did subscribe!)
I love internet culture, and I love it when interneteers get introspective on what makes the internet so weird and so great. Shane is investigating that kind of stuff right now, and I can’t dislike it.
One of the driving questions behind Shane’s documentary is shaping up to be “Are there sociopaths on YouTube?” with the obvious follow up “And is Jake Paul one of them?”
From my perspective, the answer to the first question is “DUH.” Yes, of course there are sociopaths on YouTube. There are also narcissists and people with depression. YouTube is great because it lets all sorts of people produce content, many of whom have alternate mental or physical states.
I once started playing “spot the sociopath” at work. When it becomes clear that there are low-level sociopaths in normal, everyday places (hint: they don’t always act the way you see in movies), it’s not surprising at all that some of them would gravitate to YouTube.
One of the problems of doing business online is that the stuff that gets clicks—out of curiosity, or outrage, or shadenfreude—is not the stuff that leads to long-term virtue and happiness. The most perverse of incentives.
If someone isn’t firmly grounded in themselves or some form of truth, I could see how a huge audience, lots of positive reinforcement, and wads of money would lead you down a path of delusional self destruction.
It’ll be interesting to watch how Shane’s series plays out, mostly because these things are just as much about Shane as they are about the actual subject. Literally half of the Jeffree Star series was Shane being self-conscious about how poor and inadequate he felt. Jeffree was super-gracious about everything, and I don’t know if Shane played it up for laughs, but it did not add any value to the series.
Either way, I’ll be watching the Jake Paul series.
Maybe by the end of it I’ll know the difference between Jake and Logan.
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