>>58499647I hesitate to shatter your carefully curated perception of scale, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine, purely as a thought experiment, your favorite streamer. The digital demigod you believe commands millions. Let’s grant them a fantastical 10,000,000 live viewers (because reality clearly isn’t dramatic enough). For context, the actual record, the zenith of English-speaking streaming history, barely grazed 1,000,000, a fleeting numerical hiccup before stabilizing at a thoroughly mortal 100,000 average.
Now, here’s where arithmetic becomes existential. If we confine ourselves to the U.S., a modest population of about 330 million, that “massive” audience represents a whopping 0.0002941%. Truly breathtaking. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to meet someone who thinks “MySpace” is still a thing.
And yet, the truly Kafkaesque twist? The esoteric corner of Pokémon psychosis you’re referring to has even less cultural reach, and this was back in the digital Pleistocene, when half the planet still thought the internet was “that AOL thing.” There are entire demographics who, to this day, would respond to “Twitch” with “Is that a nervous condition?” and consider “Discord” an argument, not an app.
So, before I accidentally induce an epistemological crisis, I’ll restrain myself. Suffice it to say, the “phenomena” you treat as cultural monoliths are, in truth, microscopic ripples in the vast entropy of online noise. You’re not observing society, you’re staring into a funhouse mirror and mistaking the reflection for the world.
