Congress Pressures Social Media Companies, James suffers; I feel like we’re stapled to the dock.

Renaissance Marina, Aruba, 28-JAN-2022 – There is an invasion of thoughts and observations as I’ve sat here on a dock for two weeks. The cross-cultural jump feels tectonic, like the two plates of the earth that are my life and experience shearing against each other and moving me to this Neverland.
If you stay with me for this, I’ll try to build the three-dimensional terrain that I find myself parachuted into.

I’m staying on a 48-foot Oyster, with James Evenson and his girlfriend Ana. James is forty-one; there is a maleness that comes with that age. One has learned many things about how to make the world work, and about women and men, and the world of people. One feels as if one has their footing, one has mastered their profession, but the world is always moving and no footing is ever secure.

Aruba is a vacation place where everyone parachutes in. The vast majority of people, arriving in couples, follow the rails that lead to the holidays of the vacation brochures. But not everyone.

I came of age during the second or third wave of feminism. People with double-X chromosomes were women at age eighteen, but my life experience says that girls become women at age thirty, boys become men at age forty.

The day I arrived, the world I parachuted into was a confused swirl of people I had never met: tourists, locals and friends of each; YouTubers, and other men who live on the edge of their public and private lives with the hard facets of a partially finished gemstone, incomplete, edged in some planes, smooth in others and ragged everywhere else.

The girls, as James would call them, in their twenties are what stick out in everyone’s mind, along with a teenage local girl with her local boyfriend who together are learning and exploring coming of age amid the swirl of parachutists and those on the ground intersecting and interacting.

This is a different generation than mine and a different world, different technology, and different values. All the young women are constantly taking pictures and videos. None are the ‘‘candid’’ pictures of times past; they are posed and with a difference. Bringing out a camera brings the young attractive women into the frame assembling a posed group to match the images they see. Asking isn’t necessary and they will insert themselves into the shot of a boat, confident that you did not intend to take a picture without a pretty woman in it. Each woman turns, like a 40s starlet, making sure their best side faces the camera, hands, and arms placed to lessen hips or support a bust line. Control of the public image is not practiced, it is as much a reflex as social behavior.

A twenty-three-year-old woman can be worldly, or naïve, innocent, self-aware or oblivious to who they are. They may know the larger world or simply believe the two-dimensional vision they have of it.

Men compete on any field there is to compete. A twenty-three-year-old woman can be the competitive field. In the heat of competition, the competitors may not notice or care that the field on which they compete doesn’t understand that she is merely a prize to be acquired and discarded. Other women are here to play. They understand the competition and tally their own points.

Watching a woman’s confusion and awakening in the aftermath of discovering her role, gives no one pleasure. The woman puts on a bright face and jets home. Sometimes to the life she took a break from, other times to a life she had thought she was leaving. Does she return at some future date, wiser, more hardened to chase the life she thought she would live when she arrived with a oneway ticket? I don’t know, and doubt I will ever find out.

The YouTube-verse is similar to a writer’s life: the closer to reality, the more disclosing and honest one is, the more compelling the content and hopefully the remuneration. But like journalism, the fight is for eyeballs and the attendant remuneration.

The marina, whose proper name I have not quite figured out, is across the street from the Renaissance Resort. It is a divide as big as any I can imagine. The Renaissance is the normal homogenous American hotel that one finds anywhere in the world, staffed by locals, managed by hoteliers that float amongst properties worldwide. It is a milieu that I swim in easily: I speak the verbal and non-verbal language, I walk like I belong there because I do. The number of nights I have spent in such places would be counted in hundreds if not thousands. My attire doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot; the staff and I, we know each other.

Here in the marina, there is a topology of boats formed by the people that live aboard. Standing in each vessel, looking across the marina we each see a different bas relief map. I see the people James knows. On our dock, they all make their living from the visitors to the island or through their social media. Along the waterfront, they make their living only from the visitors.

On a third line of docks, technically a quay, are true visitor boats, and among them is a Mt. Rainier of a yacht. The yacht is crewed by professionals, who bring professional, practiced skill to their work and a practiced, experienced skill to dealing with their time in port. The woman we met from the yacht looked at the competitive men the way a wolf looks at a coyote.

At forty-one, James navigates all of this easily. He also has Ana.

The US congress and the path James has taken to build an audience have collided.

James is twelfth-rated in the world of YouTube sailing videos. When James started, when I first discovered him, there were perhaps two dozen channels. Today there are two-thousand. The cost of entry is almost zero and the competition is not for steady viewership, but for the really big numbers, which come solely through YouTube’s promotion of your video.

Here comes the temptation and the trap. Steady-state viewership is nice. It brings supporters who will pay you money voluntarily to produce content. They will identify with you, feel they know you, and suffer along with you, feel your pain, and share your joy. Steady-state viewership and continued sponsorship is based on the demographics of your viewers. But the breakthrough comes in really big numbers.

The fastest way to achieve those really big numbers is to research the hot search phrases and get those into the title and description of your video. This can be the trap. The highest search phrases are related to sex and “girls”. Next is calamity, and then, I think, money.

One of James’s most successful videos was sailing a $1 million yacht across the Pacific, or at least that’s what the title said. It was a $600,000 yacht, but I won’t tell anyone, if you don’t tell anyone.

Mix together all the young women who know how to pose, who are looking for adventure and want to be on camera, and “sexy girls” doing whatever, is the quick jump to big numbers. The metaphors for this are many.

Concurrent with this is being in the Caribbean. Previously James sailed the Pacific to the lonely outposts of the world as a couple with an attractive English-speaking girlfriend. In the Caribbean, the concentration of YouTubers is truly startling. YouTubers are cross-pollinating and appearing in each other’s channels. Does it build viewership or does the cross-pollination yield a regression to the mean?* 

A thousand or so miles away Congress is making the big social media companies twist and squirm. Facebook is becoming such an easy target that Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to the ambiguous Meta. Mixed in with all the antitrust harrumphing and prodding is the notion of protecting children. For a corporation, being seen to do something is much more important than actually doing it.

Earlier this week Google, in the form of YouTube, allowed James to trap himself. Through artificial intelligence video processing, Youtube enforced new regulations that say that any video that contains anything visual that might be interpreted to promote feelings of sexual pleasure or lead to viewer to think about sexual pleasure will be limited to verified viewers over the age of eighteen. Other viewers will not see those videos in their scroll.

This means the following: any viewer under the age of eighteen will not see these videos. Any viewer who is not logged in will not see these videos. YouTube’s promotion of videos is based on the number of views that the videos have, therefore these videos will no longer be promoted because they do not have enough viewership to be promoted. Viewership falls off a cliff along with all of the revenue associated with that particular video, and looking forward, advertising revenue, promotions, and ultimately patrons.

Not all the big video channels use sex to sell. One of the top twenty sailing video channels is mostly very poorly edited, simply made with no music, videos of the vessel owner doing a monologue. He is able to make six or seven minutes of describing weevils in his oatmeal riveting entertainment. It is a rare gift.

James had found a good formula: high hype, the young women and young men he normally sails with dressed as they normally dress in the tropics doing the normal things they do, mixed with all the trials of sailing and very good how-to information. The mix worked yielding very high numbers.

We are all now worried whether the software will rate his channel as 18+ just because this is how people dress.

THREE DAYS LATER: with the application of western science, changing one variable at a time, James and another channel that also had a video moved to over-18-only found that a woman who was in both videos had done some porn. The face recognition software spotted her and changed the rating of their videos. She wasn’t doing anything that other less-dressed women had done in countless sailing videos. Big brother really does watch; George Orwell’s imagination wasn’t large enough.

*A regression to the mean happens as individuals breed, whether people or animals or flowers. Random breeding generally yields individuals who become very similar. Two people, both tall tend to have children who statistically are closer to the average height.