Clip Farms and the Far Right

For a terrorist movement to succeed, it must be able to recruit more members than get killed. The far right has a similar problem. In its current form, it operates as a decentralised network of public figures, often called stochastic terrorism. The difficulty the far right face, is to keep creating public figures as their old ones stop being effective, be that because they become irrelevant, boring, or their mask slips and their true self shines through.

The list of former far-right thought-leaders who are now nothing but footnotes is endless. Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Pewdiepie, Roosh V, Sargon of Akkad, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Dennis Prager, Steve Bannon. Even Ben Shapiro is currently on his way out. But every they lose one, there always seems to be another ready to take their place.

Part of this is just capital. There are a lot of very rich, very racist people that are willing to pay a lot of money to get a fascist into power. But I am more interested in the semi-organic clip farming industry, which has popped up as a get-rich-quick scheme which incidentally generates attention for the next generation of far-right propagandists.1

One of the recent video essays is Tom Nicholas’s Griftonomics, which looks at the relationship between grifters at all levels of the economy: from someone selling get-rich-quick-schemes on TikTok, to Uber making money by ripping off it’s drivers. This ties nicely in to the circular AI economy, where basically you realise half this post-capitalist hellscape we live in is grifting, while the other half is rent-seeking.

But somehow, the grift economy seems to always benefit fascists. On one level, it creates tightening economic conditions for the middle classes which creates the feeling that they’re losing social status. This creates space for another level of grifter to come in, and blame the marginalised, get a load of mostly young white men really angry, and let their anger shift the Overton window. Then you live in a world where Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are mainstream politicians, and Holocaust denial is no longer a career-ender for a media figure.

While I have pretty much never used TikTok, it’s unmistakable how it’s shaped the cultural landscape of the last few years. From a small Welsh metal band from the naughties going viral, to shaping the political narrative, TikTok was the dominant cultural force of the early twenties.

But more and more, the content on TikTok seems to be dominated by live stream clips. This isn’t by accident. There is an entire sub-grift economy dedicated to this.

The way it works is as follows:

  1. The creator records a live stream and uploads it to kick (twitch without content moderation).
  2. The creator (or whoever else) then posts promotions in dedicated discord channels. These promotions will offer something like £1 per 1000 views. There will be a limited pool of money, and once that’s claimed, the money will be gone.
  3. The clipper will then setup dedicated YouTube channels/TikTok pages/whatever else in order to post the clips on.
  4. The clipper will then, likely using some dedicated AI tool, find clips of the live streams that are likely to go viral, and post them to the various platforms.
  5. The clipper has two chances to make money, once from the promotion, and once from any ad revenue they get.

This is almost an entire economy of grifts. The grift spams the algorithms with shit, hoping it will stick. The promoters can pay far less than the going rate for an editor to make clips, because clippers are motivated to do it in the hope they go viral, and make unearned ad revenue. This causes platforms and marketplaces springing up to facilitate this2. The AI tools that help with the clipping contribute towards keeping Nvidia’s stock price high for another quarter. All the while, the skilled artists that create beautiful works of online video are crowded out by a dystopian version infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters. And somehow it kills the planet as a side effect.

Despite this, it gets worse, because do you know who’s really good at speaking for hours and creating attention grabbing moments? Fascists. This was literally the only thing Hitler was good at.

There’s now a whole ecosystem of Nazi streamers like Nick Fuentes, that make Ben Shapiro seem like Ezra Klein. These people are no longer kept to the fringes of society, they are creeping into the mainstream, one clip at a time. This keeps a fascist machine running, giving them new leaders just as they lose their old ones.

The economy is broken, and this allows society to be broken. The far right has more power than we do, more resources we do and is more organised than we are. And they keep finding effective new tactics. But we will win, we just have to have hope, and we have to fight.

But we must remember we can’t fix one without fixing the whole. We live in a complex system that’s heading towards fascism and annihilation. We can’t slightly improve the economy while demonising immigrants, then hope everything will be okay. We can’t bring in a few social programs but not fix the economy. We must destroy fascism, and we must destroy the conditions that allowed for fascism. But we’ve done it before, so we can do it again.

Footnotes

  1. To give a bit of credit to my sources, I was reading pluralistic, the newsletter from Corey Doctorow, who referenced a newsletter by Ryan Broderick, which was mostly discussing the concept of cool and copyright, but offhandedly mentioned this tweet about discord clip farms. I then found this video, which led me into the first of many discords. My writing is free, and I already have two jobs, so I am not going to spend weeks doing the research. Hopefully, one of you can do that. ↩

  2. The key ones seem to be OpusClip and Reap for generating the clips, while Whop and Vyro act as platforms to faciliate the payments. That said, Discord really seems the place to be for this from what I can tell. ↩

Back to Top