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The N3on Blackhole

Alright, one last dispatch from Clip World…

I get a lot of readers coming up to me at events or messaging me on Discord saying some version of, “How are you doing? I can’t imagine what it must be like staring at the worst corners of the internet all day.” They tend to assume that monitoring far-right maniacs or sifting through deranged Reddit posts or whatever really takes a toll on me. Which is, honestly, not the case, though I appreciate the concern. All of that stuff is interesting, even if it’s oftentimes gross or offensive or upsetting.

But I am surprised by how completely and totally depressed short-form video clipping has made me. I can’t really think of something I’ve covered as a reporter over the last 15 years that has put me in as dark a place as reporting on the state of short-form video has this month. In fact, I think I’m slowly losing interest with the internet as a concept.

Bloomberg has a big piece out this week on the industrial clipping complex, picking up a lot of what we’ve covered here in Garbage Day. It features an interview with Anthony Fujiwara, the head of Clipping, the company responsible for the torrent of Kick clips invading feeds right now. “In the case of Clavicular, we take advantage of every single social media algorithm so he’s unavoidable,” Fujiwara told Bloomberg. All but admitting this whole thing is rigged. Also, worth mentioning here is that the company that owns Kick also owns the casino app Stake and almost all of these clips are not-so-covert ads for Stake.

But it’s not just that all of the views on all of these viral clips are completely inflated, whether by Kick itself or a company like Clipping. Though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also the content that’s in the clips that’s making me feel so insane. Spending the last few months consuming short-video gutter culture has made me seriously question if the internet is even a place I want to be anymore. I started putting stuff online to get away from these kinds of people!

At the very bottom of the algorithm across every platform right now, you basically only see a couple kinds of videos:

Viewing the world through clips is, frankly, awful. I would rather stare a wall in a dark room than spend my time watching the endless parade of sweaty vape store-tier sweatpants men sitting around staring at their phones in unfurnished McMansions, playing dorm room icebreaker games with bored OnlyFans models. An unceasing portal into a desolate Other America dictated by Bang Bus physics. I wouldn’t even say that Streamer World is part of the Zynternet. It’s something dumber and more hideous than that. A 12-year-old boy’s psychosexual fever dream of what life must be like outside of his gamer nest.

There’s one Kick streamer who you will, no doubt, encounter as you doomscroll to the bottom of the feed. His name is Rangesh Mutama and he goes by the username N3on. His team revealed earlier this month that he’s spending around $1 million a month on clipping. Have you ever heard of him? I searched our archives and I've never written about him. Without googling, do you even know what he looks like? I doubt it. Which leads to some profoundly unsettling questions about the internet right now. How can someone be spending over $12 million a year to promote themselves and still be a complete cultural nonentity? But even if the majority of his views are fake, he’s making enough money — or being given enough money — to inflate them.

Mutama’s content is a life simulator for losers, where he’s basically just bullied by more famous streamers and professional athletes and goes on awkward “dates” with whoever the popular Instagram influencer is at the moment. Like a Truman Show for the tweaker sleeping on your high school drug dealer’s couch. Also, sometimes Jason Derulo shows up. It’s not funny. It’s not entertaining. It’s not art. It’s not anything. Watching his videos make me feel like I am watching the end of the world.

I’m going to assume you don’t know who Mutama is. Why would you? He’s not even relevant enough to have a controversies section on a Wikipedia page — or even have a Wikipedia page at all. His name does appear in an article on viewbotting, though. But according to stats shared by Clavicular, he’s the fifth-most clipped streamer on Kick at the moment. Which means we can assume the four streamers ahead of him, all with equally fake view totals, most likely, are spending more money a month to clip themselves.

And if this is how simply how things “go viral” now, it defeats the entire point of the internet. What was once a place where you could directly connect with audiences and bypass the cost of legacy media is now a place where you have to spend millions of dollars to get anyone to see your stuff. And you don’t even get to be actually famous or important. At least Alex from Target got to go on The Ellen Show. Now, you have to beg a gambling company to make it look like you’re famous and all you get out of it is a livestreamed prison sentence where you have to sit in a room with Jason Derulo all day.

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