It was over in LemonLand the Virtually Not Alone Network logo first appeared. LemonLand is a crypto-based livestreaming platform that eventually sold out to Justin Sun called DLive.
To the extent their launch was successful it was because of Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, good ole PewDiePie. I was tagging along with a Truther who followed PewDiePie over, who had been doing his YouTube backstages on Twitch.
I had been on Twitch for Critical Role, videogame voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons, with the premise of deciding to LiveStream the game they were already playing at home together. The first season was fun to follow along with their campaign, but the truly astonishing watch was the way the gifts started pouring in. Fan Art and gifts of all sorts, embraced by the cast in what - compared to previous entertainments - was a new sort of permeability to the fourth wall.
Whether they were the flagship that made the Geek & Sundry Twitch channel work or not, I got an idea of what people coming together around something they love can grow into. I watched the gifts and the fan art and the community grow, and carried the knowledge that such a thing could happen on my further internet adventures.
When I fell in with the “Truthers” (which generally includes “Flat Earthers”) I’d spend the time I spend now timestamping and the like on YouTube videos watching LiveStreams. To the extent that people all going to the same place repeatedly is a community, even when that place is online, there was very active community amongst the Truther channels.
Early on, there was a lot that was hard to follow. Like someone new to my current ‘Corner of the Internet’, I didn’t have familiarity with the other LiveStreams and Streamers referenced in chat unless they made an appearance on the show I was on. Over time, you become familiar with the corner you find yourself in and there were certainly enough ‘LiveStream Performers’ to fill up at least an 8-hour broadcast schedule.
I tried to seed the notion of the Streams coming together the way Geek & Sundry did, but nothing ever stuck. It’s hard to get people to collaborate in a neutral trust environment, and the Truther Community is far more of a paranoid distrust environment, but having seen the potential I haven’t stopped trying.
Eventually I started streaming myself. I think the guy I was watching got tired of my “WhatAboutIsm” and questions and suggestions for coverage and encouraged me to start my own channel. Some of it is still there, if you scroll far enough down. I had been giving it a go for a couple of months when my grandma suddenly took ill. She never recovered and the Truther Community started to strike me as the type to watch marathons of Law & Order, SVU.
I had been watching Owen Benjamin’s character arc since Joe Rogan smacked him down, going from writing JBP a birthday song to calling him an evil wizard, and when he finally said the owners of YouTubers were the grandkids of the Bolsheviks, they finally shut him down (but kept charging subscribers). From there he went to DLive.
I eventually started streaming over there and the VNA Network schtick was my next attempt to see if people could come together and build something. The notion was that any streamer could start slapping the logo on and join in the LARP, and it would be on the audience to shame them out of it if they weren’t actually helping people feel virtually not alone.
It started to pick a little steam when I let the people in chat know I’d use their version of the logo and a couple of people from that chat that did were streamers. I offered to run commercials for other streamers, but only one was ever recorded. This was after January 6, though, when most of the dollars that were buying crypto lemons to reward streamers went away as well as the streamers and ‘extremists’ that supported them.
There was a point along the way when it was noted how many people in these chats were recovering from OxyContin and other addictions. After all, there’s a certain non-child demographic that can spend hours a day chatting on livestreams. I think of others though.
While perhaps still a little optimistic, I think of old folks living on Social Security, people out in rural nowhere and just people in general starving for human connection. For a great deal of people, virtually is the only not-alone they have access to. I’m not positive that making that explicit is something that people are willing admit or embrace, but that’s what I get out of it when I stream and people spend their attention with me.
I believe that is a Network of people and that maybe if that is made more explicit people might be more likely to try and build things together.
Paintball for Jesus!