Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ℳ (@michellephan)

The YouTube celebrity pipeline typically looks something like this: A creator might start out within a particular niche (gaming, makeup, daily vlogging, sketch comedy), and through their onscreen charisma, develops a following made up of fans who come less for, say, the games, and more to feel as though they’re hanging out with a friend. At this point, at least one of three things will happen: Either the creator will achieve such a level of success that they’ll no longer feel “relatable” to audiences and must reckon with their persona (see: Emma Chamberlain), the creator will be subject to some level of cancellation for past actions (see: basically all of them), or the job will create such a pressure-cooker environment that the creator quits altogether — but only for a while.

Consider Shane Dawson, the controversial vlogger known for his popular conspiracy theory videos and “documentaries” about fellow YouTubers, who was quasi-canceled along with many others in June 2020 for past racist slurs and offensive jokes. After a 15-month hiatus, he returned in October 2021 with a 40-minute video called “The Haunting of Shane Dawson” and has since followed it up with other personal updates and ghost story theories. 2020 alone saw so many creator reckonings that Vulture compiled a list of 16 of the most notable; it’s become such a standard rinse-and-repeat cycle that the YouTuber apology was skewered by SNL.

There are anomalies, of course. Having grown an enormous cult following from her comedic Vines (“Merry Chrysler!” is her doing) and later her YouTube channel, Christine Sydelko left the internet in 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. “I just don’t like being famous,” she told NBC News earlier this year. “You’re lying to people to try to make them seem like you’re their friend for the sole purpose of selling things to them.” Another anomaly is Jenna Marbles, who apologized for old videos in which she wore blackface to impersonate Nicki Minaj and rapped in an offensive parody of an Asian accent in June 2020. Her account, which had 20 million subscribers, has been dormant since then.

For the most part, though, once a YouTuber reaches a certain level of success, they’re a YouTuber for life. I’m less convinced this has anything to do with the platform itself and more about the kind of person it attracts and who ends up succeeding. In my years of interviewing them, I’m always struck by the way YouTubers — and creators writ large — make sense of the world, which tends to be fervently individualistic and, at times, a little bitter. This is an understandable attitude to have when your livelihood is dependent on the creator economy, in which individuals compete against one another for the most attention possible.

Vloggers tend to be keenly, almost freakishly attuned to the in-depth analytics YouTube provides for them. “It is brilliant and terrifying how much information YouTube gives you about your content and your audience,” explains Howell. “If you’re making a video from the heart, truly expressing yourself … you are greeted with a wall of red lines saying ‘Sorry, nobody likes this, sweetie.’” He makes an apt comparison to children’s programming: Public television, for instance, can put out shows like Arthur or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood not because they’re cash cows, but because they provide a service to the public. Meanwhile, the most popular kids’ programming on YouTube seems to be a mess of LOL Surprise or Kinder egg unboxings and glitter slime ASMR videos.

Most of all, I’ve found that YouTubers tend to view other people and situations in black and white, divided between what’s good for themselves as individual creators and outside forces that wish them harm. They are often distrustful of institutions and organizations, particularly the media, whom they feel antagonize creators because newsrooms are scared they’ll be replaced by them (though PewDiePie is known most for this belief, Howell’s latest video also includes references to it). In this, they are not dissimilar to the attitudes of the wider public, who are increasingly skeptical of established institutions but quick to believe that Satanic forces are present at music festivals, for instance, and that despite evidence to the contrary, they will be among the 1 percent who makes money from joining an MLM or, say, an NFT project.

Fittingly, Phan has become something of a crypto evangelist over the past few years, shilling for an industry best known for its sky-high promises and unpredictable outcomes. After all, this isn’t so different from YouTube, where the chance to become a famous millionaire is vanishingly small but exists nonetheless. It’s such an alluring fantasy that even the YouTubers who have experienced (and been a part of) the ugliest aspects of it — Jeffree Star, James Charles, Shane Dawson, Tana Mongeau, Trisha Paytas, Gabbie Hanna — can’t truly log off. The same is true for Howell: At the end of his 90-minute monologue, in which he describes his experiences with YouTube as traumatic and terrifying, he announced he would continue to make videos, and that he would be going on a world tour called “We’re All Doomed!”

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Marvel’s latest release, provided the closest and clearest answer yet.

Image of a spoiler warning

Countless crossovers have happened and continue to happen in the comic books, but because of Marvel’s bankruptcy in the ’90s, financial deals were made that split Marvel’s superheroes’ film rights among different studios. Those deals eliminated the potential of crossover movies. Disney’s Fox acquisition was the first step in getting Marvel’s heroes under one umbrella. With the introduction of the multiverse, the possibilities are endless.

In the latest Marvel film, Doctor Strange rockets through the multiverse, entering alternate dimensions, and he finds himself in a world where a powerful group of superheroes have formed a council called The Illuminati. That group includes Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four (played for the first time by actor John Krasinski) and Professor Charles Xavier, the head of the X-Men (Patrick Stewart reprises the role). They’re joined by alternate universe MCU characters, including Doctor Strange’s own nemesis Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor). It’s one of the splashiest moments of the movie because it signals a world where all of Marvel’s iconic characters exist within the same cinematic (if not actual) universe!

Unfortunately though, they both die within 10 minutes of their appearances. It’s a rather short-lived reunion.

Still, thanks to the multiverse, their demise does not mean that these characters are dead forever. It’s complicated, and features a couple of big caveats, but here’s how those heroes could come back, how Marvel opened the door with this giant tease, and what ultimately stands between fans watching their favorite heroes all zip around in one super-sized movie.

The Multiverse means infinite versions of every hero

In the Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) travel through universes and find themselves on Earth 838 — a place that feels a lot like Strange’s home planet of 616 (the main MCU universe) but with some odd tweaks. Those differences include opposite logic traffic signs, sphere-shaped pizza, and a New York City where lush vegetation grows up on the sides of buildings. But the most significant divergence between 838 and 616 is who’s a superhero and who isn’t.

In 838, familiar faces Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) are heroes, the latter being a callback to Marvel’s animated Disney+ show What If. The 838 universe also features mutant telepath Professor Charles Xavier and cosmically-altered genius Reed Richards, both of whom are major comic book characters and appeared in Fox’s Marvel movies (Richards was previously played by Ioan Gruffudd and Miles Teller). Mordo and Black Bolt (Anson Mount), the leader of the superhuman race called in the Inhumans, and star of the very awful television show that Marvel would like us all to forget, are also present in 838. The Illuminati is a concept that’s adapted from the comic books.

 Marvel Comics

Here are the Avengers fighting the X-Men, something that regularly happens in comic books but hasn’t happened in the MCU (yet).

While I’m sure these characters had full lives in their universe, they didn’t stick around for very long in Multiverse of Madness. They fail to take 616 Doctor Strange’s warning about Wanda seriously and she — through a spell that allows her to possess a version of herself in that universe — obliterates each hero in creatively horrifying ways.

Yikes! But they’re not dead- dead.

The MCU’s multiverse rules are that when each parallel universe is created, that universe then has its independent timeline (in the Disney+ series Loki, the Time Variance Authority would eliminate parallel universes based on specific, significant events that occur in the main, “sacred” timeline). These independent universes mean then that if someone dies in one universe, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all their multiversal selves will meet that same fate in the same way — an example is the difference between the late Doctor Strange in 838 (also Cumberbatch) and the very alive and kicking Doctor Strange from 616.

So while the 838 heroes were exploded, spaghetti shredded, bisected, crushed, and had their necks snapped, there’s still a possibility that their alternate versions are faring much better. And if alternate Reed Richards, Professor X, and Black Bolt exist in the 616 it could signal the introduction of those heroes and their respective superhero teams to the MCU!

But there’s one big catch

Before we get too excited by the prospect of these heroes popping up in the MCU, there’s a big storytelling caveat that stands in the way: There’s no guarantee that the aforementioned 838 heroes are superhumans in the 616 universe. Because each universe is unique and major events occurring in those universes are distinct, the circumstances that turned Reed Richards, Professor X, and Black Bolt into super-powered individuals might have never happened in 616. They could be just regular people.

The pertinent examples of this are Captain Carter and Maria “Captain Marvel” Rambeau who share chairs on the Illuminati with the aforementioned super dudes. As we’ve seen in previous Marvel properties, their 616 counterparts never became super were just normal humans living alongside their friends Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson).

 Marvel

A screenshot from Marvel’s What If series. One episode explored Peggy Carter becoming the first Avenger.

What’s significant about Captain Carter/Captain America and the Captains Marvel origin stories is that their superhuman nature wasn’t something they were born with. In both universes, those heroes made a choice or performed a certain act, and were granted superpowers as a result of that decisive moment. This figures in with Reed Richards who, according to his comic book origin story, was bombarded with cosmic rays after he and his family venture into space. If that trip to space is altered in 616, then ostensibly 616 Reed could just be a regular guy. That said, Marvel has a Fantastic Four movie in the works, but as of yet no release date and no director.

What’s a little more unclear are the backstories of 616 Professor X and Black Bolt who, in the comics, have superpowers linked to their mutant and Inhuman DNA. Multiverse of Madness is the first time that Marvel Studios has directly referenced both characters in a movie, and Marvel hasn’t yet established mutants or Inhumans on the big screen (Black Bolt and the Inhumans were introduced in their own, universally panned 2017 tv show). Including those heroes in the MCU would be a big step for Marvel since it involves opening a can of narrative worms. It means having to explain not only who these characters are, but also the background of mutants and Inhumans, how they came to be, and how they could be present in the MCU for so long without Fury or S.H.I.E.L.D. knowing they exist.

Marvel is sort of in an odd storytelling corner because of how popular the X-Men, and to some extent the Inhumans, are. The X-Men not only have been A-list comic book characters (and are currently in the middle of a resurgence) but also have starred in two lucrative cinematic trilogies. Casual fans know their basic history, their superpowers, major characters’ arcs, and the iconic actors like Stewart who played those characters. With the X-Men, it’s not that Marvel has to reinvent the wheel, but that they need to make that wheel fit seamlessly into the MCU’s grand design.

… Oh wait, there’s one more big catch

For the most part, Marvel has mostly depicted multiversal travel as a one-way street. Characters from the 616 go to other multiverses or timelines. But if we think of the multiverse as a two-way street, then Marvel heroes from other universes could possibly hop into 616 Earth just as Strange and America blasted themselves into 838.

Rarely have there been other dimension dwellers hopping into 616. In Endgame, past 616 versions of Nebula, Gamora, Thanos, and his army make the jump to present-day 616 through time travel. They aren’t different versions of those characters though — they’re the same characters, just time-displaced.

Even America Chavez, who can travel the multiverse at will, is more or less depicted as a 616 mainstay because she spends most of her time traveling with 616 Strange. Their adventure is from Strange’s point of view.

But the Multiverse of Madness and its mid-credits scene hint that though we don’t see dimension skippers crashing into 616, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening elsewhere. Reed Richards and the Illuminati explain that multiversal travel has happened in the past and caused incursions — the Marvel term for a universe collapsing itself. The takeaway is that it’s possible to “travel” the multiverse through the use of magic spells or some way other than America’s power, but doing so risks the universe imploding.

 Courtesy of Marvel Studios
That weird vortex cloud stuff is not great! It’s an incursion!

And in that credits scene, Clea (Charlize Theron) tells Strange that she needs his help because there’s an imminent incursion happening in another universe. Clea herself can seemingly travel through the multiverse through what appears to be the dark dimension (but again, this is a credits scene and there’s a lack of information surrounding Clea and the extent of her powers at the moment).

Multiverse jumping could also be an easy narrative device to get around the massive chronological and source material knots in existing characters’ origin stories. Theoretically, it gives Marvel the flexibility to cast different actors too while, say, still paying homage to Stewart’s legacy. A story could feature a younger Professor X and some of his X-Men from a different universe (but with the same comic history) traveling to 616 and boom, they’re in the MCU.

There’s a precedent in Marvel’s comic books. Marvel’s 2015 crossover event Secret Wars included a major storyline in which the main alternate universe (Earth-1610) and others were destroyed. Ultimately, the concluding events of Secret Wars brought 1610’s Miles Morales into the main comic book universe with Peter Parker, the existing Spider-Man.

It’s not hard to see an MCU future where this plot device could be used to do something similar.

That said, with all these loops and twists, the most powerful determining factor in when we’ll see iconic Marvel characters and Black Bolt enter the MCU is Marvel’s already-packed movie release schedule. The company has Thor: Love and Thunder (July 2022), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (November 2022), Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (2023), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), the Carol Danvers- focused sequel The Marvels (2023) on the way. It also has a Blade reboot and the aforementioned F4 movie with yet to be determined release dates. This is in addition to a slew of upcoming series on Disney+ that include Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk.

Squeezing an X-Men movie into that assembly line would require shuffling sequels around.

So while the door is open for Marvel to finally bring in its beloved characters, it could conceivably take until late 2024 or 2025 before we fully see the X-Men or the Fantastic Four in the MCU. Marvel fans would surely like to see them enter the fray much sooner — and hopefully for much longer than they managed to stick around in the Multiverse of Madness.

But the real question Covid-19 has surfaced isn’t when markets fail to solve big problems — it’s when markets create or contribute to them.

Early on in the pandemic, a man hoarding over 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer in his garage made headlines and drew criticism. But instead of seeing pandemic profiteering as an exception to the general rule of well-behaved people, Cohen argues that we should see these behaviors as rational — at least under the logic of capitalism. Framing it as a few bad apples glosses over how our economic system incentivizes this kind of self- interested behavior.

It’s capitalism “functioning as it normally would,” Cohen told Recode. “There’s no extraordinary thing even happening there.” And it highlights the core conflict of interest between profit motive and public health.

The point is that our economic system doesn’t encourage us to treat public health as a collective good. That’s evident in the disinvestment of public health that’s been happening for decades, which stymies our ability to respond to health crises. The growth of for-profit private hospitals and hospital corporate monopolies has been pushed by the idea that the for-profit model could improve efficiency, but research shows that for-profit hospitals make our health care system less stable — if they’re not a successful business, they close, and we’ve seen a steady trend of hospital closures over the past several decades.

To those who’ve been paying attention to the effects of putting profit above public health, the devastation Covid-19 brought wasn’t surprising. Dr. Howard Waitzkin, a medical sociologist at the University of New Mexico, points to the decline in US life expectancy between 2014 and 2017. “And of course, since the pandemic started, it has declined a couple of more years,” he said.

How vaccine distribution played out during the pandemic also highlighted the shortcomings of our current approach to global public health. The world rejoiced when the first Covid-19 vaccines were developed, and acknowledged the importance of distributing them fairly. The faster everyone could get vaccinated, the safer we would all be from new variants. But COVAX, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative whose mission was to deliver vaccines to low- and middle-income countries quickly, ultimately failed because rich countries hoarded so many vaccines. It’s clearly not enough to recognize what the collective interest is. We have to live under a political and economic system that encourages it.

And one of the obstacles standing in the way is the view, as Gates expresses in his book, that we don’t need structural change — that we can just nudge the private sector in the right direction by using the reward of big profits as an enticement.

“I’m not defending every decision that a pharmaceutical company has ever made about pricing a product, and I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for the industry,” Gates writes. “But if we’re going to tap into their expertise in developing, testing, and manufacturing drugs and vaccines — and there’s no way to prevent or even stop pandemics unless we do — then we need to understand the challenges they face, the process they go through when they’re deciding what products to work on, and the incentives that push those decisions in one direction or another.”

In many countries, private industry did play an important role in speeding up the development of safe, effective Covid-19 vaccines through a mix of public and private funding. But too few people are calling for a deeper examination of the downsides of depending heavily on the private sector for global health issues.

Waitzkin calls this the “quasi-religious characteristics of capitalism” — that capitalism isn’t just an economic structure, but a deeply embedded ideology that often doesn’t face much scrutiny, which makes it easier to believe that our current system is the best way to promote societal well-being without seeing strong evidence confirming it. In Capital, French economist Thomas Piketty’s study of capitalism in the 21st century, he criticizes that economists don’t attempt enough empirical analysis of capitalism. Private drug companies did develop effective vaccines that helped save millions of lives — but so did Cuba’s nationalized pharmaceutical industry.

Still, a growing number of people seem to be recognizing that drastic changes are needed. “I do not see how we can prevent future pandemics unless we start with a radical rethink of the entire economic system,” said Stevano.

It’s understandable that a billionaire who made his fortunes in tech isn’t interested in criticizing a system that’s benefited him. It’s also true that technology does have the potential to improve the world’s issues in numerous ways. But Covid-19 shows us that no amount of tech or science innovation will prevent crises like Covid-19 unless we address the root of inequality: an economic structure that’s tilted so far in favor of economic growth and the already-wealthy that it systematically devalues people on the lowest rungs of the class system while demanding that they bear the highest costs.

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit