Nikocado AvocadoEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

www.goodluckgabe.life The Perils of Audience Capture How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences The Man Who Ate Himself In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed. A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend. These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting. In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn't anticipated. Top: Nicholas Perry when he first started making mukbang videos. Bottom: Perry transformed by his audience’s desires into Nikocado. Nikocado, moulded by his audience’s desires into a cartoonish extreme, is now a wholly different character from Nicholas Perry, the vegan violinist who first started making videos. Where Perry was mild-mannered and health conscious, Nikocado is loud, abrasive, and spectacularly grotesque. Where Perry was a picky eater, Nikocado devoured everything he could, including finally Perry himself. The rampant appetite for attention caused the person to be subsumed by the persona. We often talk of "captive audiences," regarding the performer as hypnotizing their viewers. But just as often, it's the viewers hypnotizing the performer. This disease, of which Perry is but one victim of many, is known as audience capture, and it's essential to understanding influencers in particular and the online ecosystem in general. Lost in the Looking Glass Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience. To understand how, we must consider how people come to define themselves. A person's identity is being constantly refined, so it needs constant feedback. That feedback typically comes from other people, not so much by what they say they see as by what we think they see. We develop our personalities by imagining ourselves through others' eyes, using their borrowed gazes like mirrors to dress ourselves. Just as lacking a mirror to dress ourselves leaves us disheveled, so lacking other people's eyes to refine our personalities leaves us uncouth. This is why those raised in isolation, like poor Genie, become feral humans, adopting the character of beasts. Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for. Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we thi