I didn't know! Back in the day, it literally used to be the 9 key, placed there as a kind of test by the developers. One of the more twisted executions of this concept must have been in America's Army, where if you didn't land correctly via a specific input you'd break your leg at the spawn point and just… crawl around. Is that meaner? I guess they're both pretty mean.

Having been a known quantity at one point, and then losing it through a combination of sin, self-sabotage, and natural entropy, it's very interesting to watch streaming go through a tumultuous adolescence. Certainly, I have deep-seated positions on everything. I am from a Seattle suburb, so of course I know what's best for the globe.

Grisly tales of abuse from Twitchcon, anti-botting techniques on the service that excised real viewers while revealing the truth of the platform's decay, and the incursion of "newgen" streamers have all exposed deep incapacities on the part of Twitch to enable success or even basic humanity. This is a "job" without the centuries of hard-won concessions that workers have secured; and now, a fun-house mirror of IRL streamers has risen to invert a basement ethos and port reality-show horseshit into the actual world.  

Gabe eventually got tired of hearing about this stuff from me. He wanted to know why I cared about it so, so much. I care because it was the Next Thing and now it feels like it was the Next Thing. The two worlds I have described above can't co-exist. They're polar opposites. We long at some level to live in the stupidest television programs imaginable.

When I heard that Gen Z was lazy, the same line of attack deployed against my own people, I had a better sense of what was going on. I'll be surprised if they're interested in watching millionaire dilettante fuckboys stream from their mansions for very much longer. The ironies have built up in the system, careening through its ribcage. The meteor is overhead.

As a cadre, no doubt some of them don't wanna do shit. There's probably never been a better time to not do shit in the history of… history. But I would be very surprised if many of them simply don't see what we did: that we are up to our asses in a grotesque level of unreality, that reward is granted disproportionately to the unworthy, and that all the promised routes to success seem to lead directly into cages.

(CW)TB out.