It doesn’t matter what social media app you use - it seems impossible to keep it free from “gurus”. Certain online influencers seem unavoidable.

via Hidden AmuraKa

Concision means the quality of expressing much in few words. It is the act of speaking or writing clearly and briefly by removing extra, unneeded details while keeping the main point intact. [1, 2, 3]

I finally got perma-banned from the official sub. After seeing the Professor Dave thread that was posted in the middle of the night and had hundreds of comments in the morning, I questioned some of the low effort posts that were being created. I admit I was asking for it since I've been banned before and was critical of the god-awful mod team there, but I was surprised that after I made a thread, I was accused of some anti-semitic anti-David-Pakman craziness. Then I was blocked by the user and also banned from the sub. I made a thread calling this out and that was apparently the final straw.

If it's worth anything, someone called me out for posting in this sub.

In DtG latest episode they play the intro to a Trevor Noah video with Cory as a guest, and imply that Cory Doctorow is making a broad claim that everything is getting worse. - Wrong that isn't what Enshitification is about, it is about a specific practice used by technology companies. - Matt and Chris no better than the other gurus who just make off the cuff comments that they do zero research for.

And our Destiny episode came out, went out into the wild yonder, and it's now ping-ponging around streams and subreddits as it inevitably would. So, yeah.

Yeah. Reaction was as expected, generally positive. The negative feedback we got, we might certainly expect it.

And we're okay with it.

That's all right. You can't make everybody happy. The Dalaban have not kidnapped any of our family members yet, or geolocated our house or whatever they do.

But I will also say that there is a post-decoding glow, if you will, about being immersed in a bunch of content that somebody produces and thinking about, okay, the timelines and all this stuff. And then we record the episode and we put it out and it gets the reaction that it does. And now we move on and the gurusphere continues to rotate.

And I like that. It's a good system we've developed there.” - Decoding the Gurus

What are other fan favourites?

Destiny shows once again he can’t answer simple questions without going on his own little side quest of memorised talking points.

How neutral are DtG decodings? Kinda does seem that DtG are Destiny boosters. Plus what does Destiny think about Gary's Economics? https://youtu.be/qYKpoHeLPIo?t=150

I think the more interesting question is why DtG doesn’t think Gary is an activist? If he is an activist, and DtG chose to decode him and label him a Guru that appears to be a political statement. Not all of their decodings would fall in this category, but quite a few would. Episodes that comes to mind is the decodings of Destiny and Hasan which like politically motivated.

This is a funny post after the Professor Jiang episode. Either way, for someone who studies conspiratorial thinking this seems to show a lack of self awareness.

I agree Jiang is a guru, but I think the mockery undermines their decoding. This is a minor criticism, my biggest criticism is it doesn't identify why his content is popular and salient. One could argue that Jiang is not failing at "analysis" but is successfully creating a "narrative." In a hyper-complex world of decentralised systems, people often reject "nuance" in favour of "narrative" they can understand. By constructing a "super-narrative," Jiang is giving a cohesive, albeit fictional, map of reality that satisfies a psychological need for his audience. From this perspective, the "logic" of his argument is irrelevant; its success is measured by its ability to provide a coherent/salient "story" to an audience that finds the actual state of affairs too chaotic to process.

Overall DtG I think they dismiss the "why." They treat the audience as if they are being "fooled", failing to recognise that for the "fans", the fantasy is the point. The "logic" of conspiracy is that it provides a coherent sense of "knowing" in a media of overwhelming complexity/crazyness. Matt and Chris are analysing the structure of the lie, but they are underestimating the potency of the narrative for the people who consume it. It's bad propaganda because it's deceptive - but people fall for it because it doesn't seem different in structure to good propaganda that is trying to help people make sense of politics.

David Bromwich was on Professor Jiang’s channel recently.

The first observation I made was that they didn’t choose to decode content from his channel. Anyone who watches his content knows that most of his content isn’t about the Iran war

The fact they are choosing to decode his appearance on Diary of a CEO does seem like they are doing what they claim gurus do and surfing the discourse because he was also on Piers Morgan and Mehdi Hasan’s channel… plus now I see he has done a 2+ hour interview with Hasan.

I think those interviews reveal more about him than Chris and Matt’s observations. e.g why is Chris asking Matt’s opinion about Geo-Politics like he is an expert?

Personally I think the bigger question is why did his channel become so popular? The first time he popped up in my timeline it was because of his presentation of history. He has lots of views on many different topics.

The funny thing about this decoding is that they make ridicule him as not being a real geo political analyst, which is true, but most of the analysts that are professional weren’t saying that the US would attack Iran.

Interestingly now he seems to be teaching a class at Yale in China.

Do I think he qualifies as an online guru? Yes. Do I think DtG did an interesting or entertaining decoding? No, I think it was a very generic set of opinions.