Anatomy of a Woke Cancel Mob. Or, how Tim Pool got canceled by his own audience.
A warning for content creators of the future about audience cultivation: Your audience will reflect your values.
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Woke cancel mobs rarely develop organically.
They are created.
Sometimes they’re created inadvertently, and sometimes it’s a more deviously focused effort.
Since cancelation is one of the most often utilized tools of the woke (on both the political left and right), and since we’re currently witnessing one of the most vicious cancelations I’ve ever seen with the cancelation of Eliza Bleu, I think it’s a good opportunity to discuss how these cancel mobs are created.
Then, I want to zoom in with a closer look at the unanticipated consequence of appealing to the worst people on the internet: Their propensity to turn on their leader.
To be very clear, I am not blaming Tim Pool directly for planning and executing the cancelation of Eliza Bleu. It started long before he was even involved, and it wasn’t his fault. And, in general, I do not believe he anticipated, desired, or purposefully created an audience to destroy people…least of all himself!
I’m writing this to treat it as a warning for future content creators: When you are not purposeful in the development of your audience, it can have unintended consequences.
The Anatomy of a Cancelation
I’ve been canceled at least half a dozen times in the last three years.
I define cancelation as when thousands of people mob you (usually online, but it can spill over into the real world too) for daring to speak an opinion that they disagree with, or if you fail to adhere to their version of a moral purity test. It can happen other ways too, but for our purposes, I’m going to discuss online mobbing.
Cancelation does not mean you must be deplatformed or lose your bank account (although I have been deplatformed multiple times due to the focused efforts of my harassers). Social ostracization is just as powerful a weapon.
When the political left cancels you, they are much more likely to go after your bank account.
When the political right cancels you, they are much more likely to use social ostracization and personal attacks.
That’s not to say that people of either political persuasion can’t use the others’ tactics. I’m simply suggesting a more likely preference of what they are inclined to do if given the opportunity to form a mob. And each one leads directly back to their core values and motivations:
The political left is more likely to go after money because their primary goal is to gain power over other human beings to get them to bend the knee to their will because gaining power over others is one of their primary goals.
The political right is more likely to make personal attacks because they are desperate for approval and acceptance, as well as obsessed with appearance. So, they believe that social approval matters more than money or power. And making you “look bad” to convince you that you have something to be embarrassed of is considered a victory.
When cancel mobs start, all it takes is one primary instigator with a group of lieutenants to help them.
It starts with the spark: You did something that hurts the fragile sensibilities of the primary instigator. It could be anything, from something as small as looking at them the wrong way to saying something they find offensive, to you being more popular than they are, or getting more attention than they do. It really could be anything, and oftentimes you don’t see it coming until it’s already begun.
The cancel mob is not likely to come after you unless they perceive you to be having some success that they, themselves, are not having. Otherwise, there would be no reason to cancel you. So, the spark is that you’ve had a victory. The result is that they perceive they’ve slapped you down to size. They may even say you’re full of yourself, have a big head, need to be put in your place, etc.
In order to achieve their goal of making you suffer for their amusement, they will find a fatal flaw: A mistake (real or contrived) that you have made in you past that they can exploit to use against you in order to achieve their primary aim: Attacking your money, attacking your reputation, or a combination of both. The primary instigator releases the information, which is always twisted to be interpreted in the most negative possible way, and then uses their lieutenants to help them spread the information around the internet.
Their goal is to get coverage from influencers with large accounts (useful idiots) that need content to outrage their audience each day to keep them clicking. That’s how they make money - by building outrage and then using it to generate likes, clicks, shares, watch hours and superchats.
The useful idiots have no incentive to present the clickbait they’ve just acquired with any nuance. The more outrage they generate, the more money they make. And so what was already presented badly will now be twisted to be worse through this game of telephone, and all of a sudden you have thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of people galvanized against a single person as the most evil being to ever walk the earth.
They inundate their feeds, DMs, comment sections, email inboxes, and even their phone numbers, demanding answers or accountability for their perceived transgressions. Addresses are doxed. Death threats are made. They may even drag your friends and your family into it. The goal is nothing less than making the target’s life a living, breathing hell. The goal is either to:
Force the target to bend the knee to the will of the mob to make the pain go away. If this happens, the target will receive a brief reprieve, but they will always be at the will of the mob.
Make the target believe they are going crazy in order to get them to react irrationally so they can take any reaction and twist it out of context to continue to attack, thus creating more pain.
Silence the target by getting them to delete their accounts, leave the internet, or even commit suicide.
Yes, the mob would celebrate if you killed yourself at their hand. That’s how fucked up these people are.
Most of the people in a cancel mob have never even heard of the person they are canceling: The cancel mob is their introduction. They don’t really care about the person, and they don’t care about the transgressions. They only care about feeding their outrage addiction.
The more influential any single member of this group of unhinged idiots is, the larger the cancellation has the potential to grow. So, for example, maybe the primary instigator doesn’t have a very large following…but they happen to be best friends with someone who has a very large platform, that single person can make the mob skyrocket in size.
The only way to get through a cancelation once it starts is to make the decision to walk through the storm until you reach the other side.
If you surrender, they will own you.
If you give up and turn back, they will own you.
You must make it through the storm, whether that takes hours, days, weeks, or longer.
If you make it through the storm, you will be more powerful than the mob. If you do not, you will forever be at their mercy until you do.
Remember, the mob doesn’t care about the things they claim to. They only care about making you submit to them.
So, what does this have to do with Tim Pool?
The thing about Tim Pool is that I really do believe he has positive intentions.
The problem is that he makes boneheaded choices. Not all of the time, but enough when it matters.
I’ve talked to multiple people who have worked for Tim and they’ve all told me the same thing: When he got COVID, he almost died. And when it passed, he had changed. He was suddenly highly focused on expanding his empire as fast as he could, getting as big as possible as quickly as possible.
It was this desire to expand as rapidly as he could that inadvertently lead to him cultivating an audience that has been captured by the most vocal, toxic minority. It’s a minority that are mostly young men that are inclined to be attracted to the incel or MGTOW communities and alt-right influencers, who are angry at their lot in life, and who are bored. This is a dangerous combination.
He did this through his choice of guests, his choice of topics, his choice of headlines, and his choice of approach, knowing full well that his rapid expansion depended on him appealing to people on the political right who live on the internet, believe Twitter is real life, are drooling of the possibility of a civil war, and will support anyone who tells them exactly what they want to hear and reinforces the idea that young men are the real victims in the world.
If I’m honest, I believe he was cultivating it before COVID. But it expanded rapidly afterward.
I’m not suggesting everyone in Tim Pool’s audience is toxic. Far from it. The vast majority of people who watch Tim Pool are very fine people. Seriously.
But there is a small segment that is incredibly toxic, maybe 15-20%.
I’m also not suggesting that this toxic minority segment don’t have some legitimate grievances in the world. But when you allow your entire view of the world to be controlled by your grievances, there’s a problem.
Sadly, that toxic segment has the most power in his community, even if they are vastly outnumbered by the very fine people.
And in the last week, that toxic segment turned against the man who cultivated them, making demands that he was under no obligation to fulfill.
He resisted at first. He told them no. He told them to fuck off.
And so they got worse, as they were always going to do if he didn’t relent. They made greater demands this time to punish him for his insolence. Drive him crazy, get him to quit, or force him down on his knees - those were the goals, and achieving any of them would do.
Then, he bent.
He retreated in the middle of the storm.
He apologized. He gave them what they wanted. He retreated.
Now, he’s at their mercy until he makes it to the other side. As long as he stays on the internet, this will happen again. It’s only a matter of when.
Tim Pool’s audience absolutely overlapped with the audience canceling Eliza Bleu (for which Brittany Venti, Chrissie Mayr, Blaire White, and Candace Owens were all useful idiots), and there is no doubt that they targeted Tim as a useful idiot to spread their message as a part of that cancelation. He refused, until he didn’t.
We all watched Tim Pool’s audience cancel Tim Pool, hammering him until they finally forced him onto his knees to kiss the ring and meet the mob’s demands.
How an audience got Tim Pool to kneel
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow an audience.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be famous.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow a successful, thriving, multi-million business on YouTube.
But when you’re bringing a lot of people together under one roof on a nightly basis, it can be a tricky thing because it’s very easy to lose sight of the dangers of appealing to the wrong people.
The most powerful people in any social system are NOT the people with the fanciest title, or the most money, or the fastest car, or the best looking.
The most powerful people in any social system are the ones who are expressive.
They are the ones voicing their opinion, through chat, through comments, through DMs, through emails, through making videos, etc.
The people who speak up are always more powerful in regard to influencing the direction of the community than the ones who stay silent.
This is why the “silent majority” tactics of the political right will always lead to them losing: With rare exceptions, you cannot remain silent and win.
If the most optimistic people in your audience are the most expressive, then your community will generally be pushed in an optimistic direction and be able to look on the bright side, see things as an opportunity rather than as something to be feared.
Conversely, if the most toxic people in your audience are the most expressive, then your community will generally be pushed in a toxic direction closely resembling the hellscape of Twitter.
Do you think it’s any coincidence that Tim Pool has been trending on Twitter almost every day for weeks?
Have you seen Tim Pool’s chat in the last few months?
Or his comments section? Or his Twitter replies? Because it’s not pretty.
And it hasn’t been pretty for a while. I’m not suggesting everyone in any of those mediums is toxic, but generally, the toxic outnumber the optimistic.
Something like this might happen if a person spends two solid years yelling CIVIL WAR. He might attract people who are desperate for a civil war. Those are generally not the most optimistic of folks.
Tim Pool’s audience got hijacked by its most toxic segment.
Those people now run the show.
And they know they can get Tim to bend to their demands…until he doesn’t anymore.
Tim has to make the decision to walk through the storm next time it happens, to make sure his toxic minority knows who the big swinging dick is.
And it wouldn’t hurt for him to start making different choices about his approach, to cultivate his audience too, something that encourages the less toxic elements to speak up and express themselves. He might also consider curating his community, implementing a blocking strategy to prevent the toxic elements from taking over.
This will cost him money.
But it will also help him regain his integrity, which I do believe is in there somewhere. It’s just gotten lost in the last few years.
Tim has to decide which is more important: Money or integrity. Both options require a sacrifice.
If he chooses money, fine. Nothing wrong with that. But he should plan to spend a lot of time on his knees moving forward. Maybe he has kneepads from skateboarding that he can use to soften the position.
If he chooses integrity, he has to reclaim his audience from the toxic element that’s hijacked it. Which will cost him money.
Tim Pool is perfectly capable of building a media empire, but not if he is pandering to an audience that will cancel him if he doesn't do what they want.
But he doesn’t need to build an empire in order to make a lot of money. He just has to sell his soul and everything he ever claimed to care about.
The empire is through the storm. He has to decide how much he wants it.
The audience reflects the creator
Two and a half years ago, Tim Pool publicly called me a social justice warrior on Twitter because I questioned the wisdom of bringing a certain toxic guest on his show, allowing him to significantly expand his audience.
But here’s the irony: Years after this interaction, my audience has never once formed into a woke cancel mob.
In fact, when they have tried, I’ve put a stop to it very quickly. I don’t want that being done in my name.
But Tim’s has.
Not only did Tim’s audience form into a woke cancel mob, but they turned on the very person who created them.
The audience reflects the sensibilities of the creator. I have a much smaller audience than Tim and always will, but part of the reason is that I have actively curated my audience, preventing the toxic elements from joining it and influencing it with a strictly enforced blocking strategy that keeps out the riff-raff.
I knew that the minute you start letting the toxic and vocal elements in is the minute you lose control.
Tim didn’t hear that lesson. He purposefully appealed to the widest possible audience, bringing on guest after guest after guest and covering story after story after story that actively encouraged the most toxic elements to join. As his audience grew, this small subset gained more power.
And here we are.
It will be fascinating to watch what Tim does next.
Personally, I hope he chooses integrity. But money is a powerful drug.
Update
Since this essay was published, Tim Pool has further bent the knee to the woke cancel mob, proving that (for the moment, anyway) he is choosing money over integrity.
He removed all three parts of Shane Cashman’s articles about Eliza Bleu, not because Shane got it wrong but because the audience didn’t understand it.
But, the internet never forgets and all three parts are still available via the wayback machine.
They will live on here and in many other places.
Tim Pool has fallen to the woke mob. As long as he continues on this path, we cannot trust a single word he says. He has told us his highest priority is avoiding cancelation, not telling the truth.
It’s too bad.
What do you think?
Where do you think Tim Pool goes from here? Leave a comment and let me know! And please share this with your friends and family who need to learn this information.
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The viciousness of the attack on Eliza Bleu immediately made me not trust the attackers. The Glee they had while trying to destroy her disgustied me. But, I am not innocent. I gleefully participated in the cancellation of Jack Murphy last year. I was pissed off at how he treated Sydney Watson then lied about it on Timcast. Then I got madder when Tim Pool wouldn’t address it. I cancelled my TIMCAST subscription and started watching more of The Quartering. I still believe Jack Murphy is a liar and a Grifter but I was wrong to revel in his destruction. I will continue to Troll but I won’t take part in the destruction of someone like that again.
I don’t think people can criticize the doxing of LibsOfTikTok while supporting attacks on Eliza Bleu. In both instances it’s people getting off on targeting their tribal enemy for destruction with no presumption of innocence or due process.