Last month, AndyPants Gaming put up a video just under ten minutes long called GTA 6 is feminist slop, and a million people watched it. This is a man whose public file has become exceedingly long and tiresome: the flip from the old Andy Xbox posts that praised diversity and Starfield to an anti-woke cadence that actually pays; the Act Man debate and the copyright claim on that video; and then an AI game called Chad vs. the Gay Nazis, banned off storefronts and followed by a year of comments about what he allegedly put into it. Whether you believe his denial or anyone criticizing him is not the point of this article. AndyPants is an excellent example of the problem with the current mode of engagement that much of social media lives on.
Look at the actual product. AndyPants’s videos are short, repetitive, and built entirely out of moral and emotional language the algorithm already knows will sell: woke, gay, slop, feminist, Jew, “they ruined it,” and so on. That is followed by millions of views, thousands of likes, and comments filled with the same fight that has followed him and every other grifter for years.
Rage-bait works because the brain still treats threat and violation as high-priority signals. “This is terrible” is quality engagement. So is “this is based.” And YouTube cannot tell a sermon from a slot machine, which is why AndyPants keeps showing up in your feed, despite his humiliating debate performance and what his AI video game supposedly contains.
And yes, the format works like a slot machine. Short, lazy commentary. A cut every few seconds. No sentence has to finish before the next one starts. The talk just keeps spilling. The rewards do the rest, and they are uneven by design. Talk about Rockstar or Hasan Piker and the video explodes. Talk about an old game nobody is fighting over and the video dies.
AndyPants has admitted the trap out loud. The anti-woke videos on his main channel are the ones that hit. He has said he wanted to review games, but the audience painted him into a corner. People want him to talk about woke stuff, so that is what he is stuck with. That is audience capture in his own words. The room clapped for the persona, and the persona swallowed the person.
His older channels make the capture visible as a career. Console-war fan content and “diversity is good” content had a visible ceiling. The anti-woke cadence did not. A bounded interest became a total identity because totality pays. Whether the beliefs became sincere after the fact is beside the point. The incentives can be measured.
Then there is Chad vs. the Gay Nazis, the AI shooter he tried to sell when Steam, Shopify, and Linktree would not hold it. Fandom Pulse framed the takedowns as a coordinated leftist campaign against a parody of identity politics. Critics, including Moist Critical’s orbit and a year of reply guys, framed the game as something else: a self-insert rescue fantasy dedicated to his daughter Margaret, with allegedly AI-generated images of children in sexualized or surveilled situations. AndyPants has answered that in the only way the format allows.
Popularity, in this economy, does not mean the allegations vanished. It means the allegations became another retention loop. That is the point. A creator whose public life is a running prosecution of other people’s degeneracy can remain “popular” even after his own work becomes the exhibit, because the platform does not score moral consistency. It scores whether you are still a high-priority signal.
If AndyPants were trying to persuade you, he would say: here is my case about Rockstar; take it or leave it. That is not what he sells. He sells a fanfic plot. And in that plot, you are the main character. You are one who sees that the games went gay and you are the last holdout for a hobby that got stolen. The fanfic makes you feel important and because it feels important, it starts to feel true no matter how outrageous the caricatures become. It becomes who you are. “Anti-woke” becomes the name, no matter how deranged your company becomes. Walking away feels like joining the thing you were warned about. Add the years already spent watching him and leaving would mean those years were wasted. So his fans stay. The cost is Sunk.
Almost every large influencer works this way. The tricks are old: Do someone a small favor and they feel they owe you. Get them to say it in public and they will defend it. Show them a crowd that already agrees. Talk like an expert. Tell them the window is closing. Act like their friend. All of these tactics wers mapped out before YouTube existed. AndyPants is just one of many influencers who runs that pitch at “YouTube Channel” scale. Make no mistake, however. You are not in a public square arguing about video games in any meaningful sense. Instead, you are in a system built to keep you watching people who will say and perform whatever you want them to say and perform.
That is why AndyPants still shows up in your feed.
You’re Unemployed and Exploitable
Most of what gets branded as “community” online is an audience arranged around a creator. Even when that engagement looks full, it is empty. Devoid of value. People reply, pile on, and disappear. No one in the comments section is responsible for anyone else when the video or stream ends.
A large share of the consuming side is either not working or working in a way that never touches the hours given to the feed. They complain about their circumstances with real intelligence, which at least suggests education. They can diagnose a culture, a media cycle, a personality, a lie. Then they stop. There is little incentive to change the thing being described, because the description has become the whole activity. Intelligence is spent on thin targets: the latest exposé of someone the room is already primed to dislike, or the latest purity test of someone who was supposed to be on the same side. Those segments might be worth the time if anyone involved were doing more than blowing hot air into the feed.
Idle intelligence is good soil for this kind of influencer exploitation. A person who is sharp, underemployed, socially thin, and full of undischarged grievance has time to watch, language to argue in, and little counter-pressure from a job or offline group that would punish his fantasies. The constant diagnosis of other people becomes a lifestyle. The critic who cannot fix his own life becomes fluent at unmaking other people’s. Meanwhile, the “community” that forms around the feeding looks alive in the analytics and remains dead in the obligations.
The algorithm pays for cadence, for the right slurs of emphasis, and for a cut every few seconds so no sentence can survive contact with the next one. Many commentators do not have much to say, which is funny, because their voices are almost clinically restless. Fast talk is a way of never having to inhabit a position long enough for it to be tested. It also matches the inner weather of people who have a great deal of verbal horsepower and very little stake in what they talk about. Even after hours of listening, you still cannot say what they really believe. This is true on the right and on the left. They will hand you the words. On one side: tradition, freedom, God, the West, the working class. On the other: justice, equity, care, community, the marginalized. The vocabulary arrives on schedule. What never arrives is a construction of language in which those words have to bear weight. The slogans are there. The sentence that would commit them is not.
So what community is being built? What positive account of the good is being offered once the target is finished? Have you left a mark on the world? Do you have any significant presence in the real world that would outlast your access to social media? Do you have a place where your effort changes something other than the metrics of your favorite influencer? When those things are missing, the problems you cannot solve get exported into the only “community” you have. Which, sadly, is not a community at all.
If you are not working, if you have no employees, no inventory, no hours that must be accounted for to someone who can fire you, then the world becomes an abstraction you can savage without cost. All your criticism becomes costless. All your purity spiraling becomes cheap. If you are in rebellion against God, you are exploitable. If you do not believe in anything that can tell you no when the comments tell you yes, you are exploitable. A man with a God, a church, a vow, a craft, or even a stubborn loyalty to a place has somewhere to put his weight. A man with only social media content has nowhere to go. He will accept the first voice that offers him the hero’s garb and a dragon to fight. He will call that discernment and make the comment section his community.
At that point, all this destructive boredom spent on killing people online through criticism, purity spiraling, and the rest is only the result of a vast nothingness these influencers are harvesting, and it is all being done without any means or desire to change anything. It is empty engagement. Thousands of replies that commit no one to the future.
The question that keeps returning is crude and necessary. Are you working? What investment do you have in the civilization, the town, the shop, the household you spend your days dissecting from your computer? If the answer is none, then your dissection is worthless. You are living in the ruins of other people’s attention and pretending it is a legitimate movement.
Because you cannot or will not change your own future, you look for ways to destroy others and call it righteousness. This is true on the left and on the right. A so-called right-winger sitting in an armchair doing commentary every day, living a spiritually unfulfilling life, has no standing to announce that someone on his side, or anyone else, is failing a standard he himself does not meet while he reads Super Chats and collects fifteen-dollar monthly memberships to blow hot air about a society he will never change. The same is true of the left-wing version: the same chair, the same donations, the same sermons about solidarity from a life that will not touch the world it claims to save.
Pride Makes You Vulnerable
The word grifter has been stretched until it means “person whose politics I dislike who also has a Patreon.” Now every opponent is a con artist, and you no longer have to ask whether they are wrong, lonely, audience-captured, or simply mediocre. You only have to assign motive. Useful distinctions still exist. There is the extractive cynic who knows his pitch is hollow and optimizes for outrage because outrage converts. There is the captured believer, who started with a real position and then followed the loudest part of the audience until the persona became the person. There is the industrial slop operation, where ideology or aesthetics is a skin and the product is watch-time. And there is the purity prosecutor, who may not even be rich. Status and moral dominance are the currency. Destruction of adjacent people is the content. The last type is easy to confuse with the first. Both talk fast. Both live on exposure. Only one of them is primarily running a till. Both produce the same result: rooms that feel crowded and contain no social cohesion.
The grifter offers a plot in which the mark is special. Online grifting runs that plot at industrial scale. The influencer does not want you to sit down and learn. He convinces you that you see what the less intelligent rabble cannot. The moment you decide you are too smart to be exploited, you become the easiest person in the room to exploit. At that point the pitch can stop arguing and start flattering. People who already think of themselves as sharp are primed for that plot. They do not inspect the offer as carefully as they think, because inspecting it would mean entertaining the possibility that they are ordinary. That possibility is what they are paying not to feel. A Super Chat, a follow, and a subscription are fees paid to keep the feeling that you are the one who is not being taken for the same ride as everyone else.
We are all susceptible to grift. But the one thing that makes us more susceptible is the belief that we are not.
Intelligence helps you recognize repeating patterns. Humility is also necessary: knowing that you are the kind of animal these tricks were built for. Without that, intelligence is only a finish on the surface the pitch can grip. The con artist does not call you stupid. He convinces you that you are the one person in the room who isn’t. Influencer culture and political commentary run that line all day. You are Eustace Scrubb, the boy who sees through everyone else and then has to sit in a fake “community” full of other people who have also deemed themselves more intelligent than the next person and better at seeing through the shit than you. That is also why these “communities” inevitably fall apart or lurch into drama cycles. A room packed with people whose whole identity is seeing through everyone else will, sooner or later, have to see through each other.
To bring this back around, AndyPants is the logical conclusion of how the market currently functions. The market only works because the audience never has to see these people when the camera is off and the editing is not there to cover the fact that they have nothing worthwhile to say. It only works if viewers are free to hallucinate alternatives to their actual lives while they subsist on whatever is keeping them afloat: a benefit check, parents, a job that never interrupts the feed. It only works because the standard of truth moves when the thumbnail changes. It only works because almost nobody is humble enough to admit they are the ones being exploited.
A real community would require the opposite posture. It would require people who have something to lose, who can hold a thought for more than three seconds, and who can say who they are without immediately recasting themselves as another victim of society.
So the question you need to ask yourself is not whether AndyPants is a good man. The market, the attention economy, already answered that. It does not care. The real question is whether you are in a real community or whether your entire worth amounts to a short blast of hot air in a comments section. What in your life would still hold value if your favorite influencer channel, and every channel like it, went dark tomorrow? If the honest answer is almost nothing, then you are not holding the line in any culture war. You were just funding someone else’s fallout shelter.
