On Tim Pool And Ideological Capture And Online Cruelty

Let's do that thing where we hold a couple thoughts in our head at the same time

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There’s a weird controversy involving Tim Pool, an increasingly off-the-rails YouTuber with almost 1.2 million subscribers. Things weren’t always this way: He first became known for livestreaming Occupy Wall Street protests, and was subsequently mainstream enough that he worked for Vice and Fusion. Here’s an old Guardian article about him with a headline that captures the spirit of 2013 better than the most talented poet ever could: “How Vice's Tim Pool used Google Glass to cover Istanbul protests.” 

These days, though, Pool’s output includes a lot of truly gonzo conspiracy-theorizing. On a recent episode of his YouTube show, he had on Jack Posobiec, genuinely one of the craziest people in the right-wing swamposphere, to speculate about the true cause of the Waukesha killings (here’s a bit on Posobiec). Pool was also a prime vector of a false rumor about supposedly trashed mail-in ballots in Sonoma County, California that fueled the Trump-really-won rumors that eventually flared out of control. These are two of many examples.

Now, to be clear, I’m not sure Pool is even in the 15% of the worst big-name purveyors of online misinformation and hysteria. But he’s pretty bad. And he’s extremely successful — he appears to be getting rich doing this. As The Daily Beast explained in a pretty memorable story about, among other things, Pool allegedly taking a cat hostage during tense business negotiations, he has “amassed more than 1.1 billion cumulative views. He has a million-dollar mansion in the Maryland woods, complete with a podcast studio and a skate park. Donald Trump invited him to the White House.”

At present he is embroiled in a controversy involving Australia. As this helpful article in Quillette explains, Pool is one of a handful of pundits who have stoked the fires of truly outlandish conspiracy theories about the Australian government’s coronavirus policies in indigeneous Northern Territories communities, all while seeming to lack a single clue what’s actually going on there, and exhibiting no interest in finding out.

Tim Pool @Timcast

"authorities had identified 38 close contacts in Binjari — a number he said was likely to rise — who were transported to Howard Springs on Sunday." So, the Asutralian army is now shipping people to concentration camps for contact with someone with COVID?

abc.net.au‘Threat to lives is extreme’: Army brought in to help contain NT COVID-19 outbreak amid nine new casesThe NT’s Chief Minister says the federal government has offered to deploy 20 ADF personnel, as well as army trucks, to assist with the unfolding situation in the remote community of Binjari.

Tim Pool @Timcast

Oh God So the Austrlian military is forcing indigenous people not to leave their homes and relocating many to camps? Claire really is a nazi https://t.co/2jwJ8ek5sV

Claire Lehmann @clairlemon

They're transferring people from remote Indigenous communities who live hundreds of kilometres from any hospital. You clearly know nothing about Australia, so I suggest you stop tweeting about us like an ignorant blowhard @Timcast

Tim Pool @Timcast

The people at @Quillette are either idiots or they are assholes I was criticized for saying exactly this would happen by the cowards https://t.co/oIUMNAK15w

Do read the Quillette article (Lehmann is the site’s founder and is herself Australian), but the key takeaway is simply that this is all hysterical nonsense on Pool’s part. And it got me thinking about audience capture, a term introduced, at least in this context, by Eric Weinstein. It basically means getting stuck in a self-reinforcing loop in which you give your audience exactly what they want. In some cases, it can turn you from a relatively sane-seeming person to a relatively crazy-seeming one.