Weekly Scroll: JD Vance Eats Cats

Lying is cool now, so why not?

This one’s coming a bit late, internet gremlins. Due to a vacation last week and what is likely an emerging case of COVID in the Scroll household, this week we’ve got the schedule mixed up - the Weekly Scroll is coming midweek and our topical post will be on the weekend.

Yes, we’re going to talk about the ‘Haitians eating cats’ thing and the debate. But that kind of deliberate cruelty makes me angry enough that I’m turning on the paywall for that part. Subscribe if you want your dosage of internet pure and unfiltered!

We are all Avocados

I’ve talked about the YouTuber Nikocado Avocado before in the context of audience capture. Niko is infamous for having destroyed his body in the pursuit of viral fame:

Consider the case of Nick Perry, aka Nikocado Avocado. Perry started his content career as a milquetoast vegan violin performer. But to his detriment, Perry tried doing a few mukbang videos where he would eat large meals of various foods. His audience loved them - and demanded more. Not just more mukbang content, but bigger meals, more extreme eating challenges. Perry took up the challenge and created the ‘Nikocado Avocado’ personality. The end result, a few years later:

I’ll be honest - I don’t watch his stuff much and never will. His personality is awful and grating, he constantly engages in histrionic outbursts, and I had no interest in watching someone destroy themselves. But we need to talk about Niko, because he just pulled one of the greatest ‘social experiments’ of all time.

Here’s a screencap of Niko from his most recent YouTube short, released a few months ago:

And here’s his most recent main channel video from earlier this week:

Niko apparently pre-recorded two full years of mukbang videos, and has not actually made a new video in that entire time. He has spent the last two years losing around 250 pounds of weight and is fully back to the weight he was when he was a soft spoken violin player trying to make it big. I don’t actually recommend watching the reveal video all the way through because he spends most of it talking like Voldemort, but this is one of the more astonishing reveals I’ve ever seen from a content creator.

On the internet, everyone changes who they are a little bit. You do it and I do it. We curate our Instagram so that we look like we have fun, effortless lives. We tweet in a certain way to get more popular. We lean into writing certain things on our blog because we know the readers like that kind of content - I’m guilty of that. We’re all at least a little bit willing to change who we are for the camera. Nikocado Avocado is simply the extreme manifestation of that. When he was a smaller account, he constantly talked about wanting to gain viral fame and how that would mean more than anything to him. He was willing to potentially kill himself to do it.

And now he’s orchestrated another massive change. While fat, he would sometimes talk about how this was all a bit, he wanted to exploit the algorithm until he was 30 and then he’d go back to normal. At the time, it seemed like a fat guy coping. Now it seems like he actually had a plan and stuck to it.

Niko’s entire schtick of being a whiny fat emotional loser really might have been a calculated play the entire time? What I take from this is that we’re all a little bit like Nikocado, he’s just more honest about his willingness to change who is he for the sake of online strangers than we are. He’s certainly the far end of that spectrum, but this is just the logical conclusion of falling into the viral rabbit hole. And it’s worth considering: How different is it really from what you and I do every day?

Haitians Are Not Eating Cats

There’s a famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre about anti-Semites that I come back to frequently:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew

This story is about Haitian immigrants instead of Jews, but the same principle applies. Over the last week, conservative social media has worked itself into a frenzy over the viral lie that Haitian refugees are stealing people’s pet cats and dogs and eating them. Here’s the background: