or, An Analysis of Digital Media Manipulation in a Dissident Attention Market.

(4,037 Words.)

I have close to 15 years of experience working in Marketing and Advertising. I’ve worked in small agencies and some of the largest in North America, I’ve worked client-side and in the startup space, I’ve worked on multimillion dollar campaigns and on more than one occasion been employed as a door-to-door salesman. I believe my decision to smoke cigarettes and be bad at it was a public service I shall never be recognized for in my time.

As diseased as it may sound, I pursue this line of work not only because I am good at it, but because I like it. These problems concerning how to make a business succeed and how to get the correct message in front of the correct people are mentally stimulating, and I have been known to do it for free. I’ve worked with a mountain of clients over the years, even many in This Thing Of Ours, on a variety of different projects.

At a project’s outset the same question must be asked of them all: what is it you want to do? It sounds simple, but you would be amazed at how few companies – from start-ups up to multinational conglomerates – never think to ask this of themselves. Let’s veer towards Example Street. Many years ago, it was a best practice for every business to have a blog. You don’t see HVAC installers and car dealerships doing that much anymore, but there was a time entire agencies were built upon servicing that trend. For what purpose do you want a blog? Because that’s what your competition is doing. Understood, but what do you want to accomplish with the blog, and how does this serve your narrower business goals? That’s a jungle of a meeting you can have fun hacking through.

Lurking in the darkness beneath “what is it you want to do?” is “what do you want?” This is the fundamental question you must chart a path towards. The earlier the better.

How messages propagate and how information ecosystems function is of deep interest to me. There are eras of media, and each era has its own rules for how to craft an effective message. The era we inhabit now requires strategies that were never demanded of organizations or individuals decades ago, back during the Golden Age of Advertising when copywriters could take at least a shred of pride in what they do.

I could write a dozen articles on the basics of messaging psychology, media buying strategies, and the awareness funnel to name a few, but I want to focus on digital influence. Specifically, what people believe to be organically emergent trends which are covertly coordinated and funded. This applies to anyone who wants to make a name for themselves through design, writing, hosting a show, or grinding dollars from shitposts.

Most people are thinking inside an antiquated paradigm, believing the key to going viral is making something sensational, perhaps even good. Once you begin considering this seriously, the pursuit – especially if initiated now – is fraught with complication.

I am writing now about the nature of online influence in this particular political milieu, during this chaotic transitional period.

The internet is much different from how it was a decade ago. How does one reconcile the proliferation of internet access with intuitive assessments such as Dead Internet Theory? AI is being sourced from insane liars, but the data reported by digital platforms cannot be trusted either. There was a time when brands or individuals could rely on the organic reach of their efforts, but the pay-to-play model has been standard for years. At an agency I worked at years ago I was tasked with creating the Influencer Marketing department, and as I opened negotiations with influencer agencies it was clear that the talent they were prostituting was lousy with vanity metrics. You could get signed if you had a sufficient follower count and engagements were less important, at least at the time. They were pitched the same way you would sell billboard space.

These agencies remain the dream of many online personalities, offering security, legitimacy, and assurances of more exposure. Entering the Big House is supposed to acquire you the game-changing audience, but the tactics the big dogs use aren’t any different than the independents. The good news for you is the entire system is rotten and everything is fake and death comes suddenly and it’s not going to feel the way you always imagined it would during those dark 1-3 PMs of the soul.

The problem has come into sharp relief for people who track their analytics: how can we be sure the thing we are doing is actually getting in front of real people?

Botfarms and Clipmarkets

Online denizens complain about creators they perceive to be enjoying sudden and explosive popularity; often they are incorrect in the sense the subject can be proven to have an archive of old content proving a middling incline, but occasionally they are correct in their suspicion. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity, yes of course.

However, some people really do just appear out of nowhere, or their propulsion is inexplicable.

One example is Professor Jiang, a Canadian citizen of Chinese extraction who relocated to China and subsequently became 20x more Chinese. As of this writing, he boasts approximately 2.5 million YouTube subscribers. He came to most people’s attention in 2026, but his channel history goes back to 2023. The earliest data we have access to goes back to May 2025 where he had 11,000 subscribers.

His penetration into the zeitgeist was bewildering, especially since his production quality is remarkably poor and he is at least aesthetically filming from a Beijing classroom. It just looks so unforgivably Chinese.

YouTube is officially blocked in China, so such a consistent release schedule coupled with international notoriety all while delivered entirely in English is intriguing. More puzzling is why Professor Jiang would be allowed back into China after he was deported in 2002 for allegedly working with the United States on cultural subversion. Putting that to the side, his wildly popular videos on topics such as America’s inevitable demise and how Trump must live forever have built into appearances on Tucker Carlson and Medhi Hasan. Taken in aggregate, this is abnormal.

In all likelihood these views are in large part driven by bots, and while the purpose of this article is not conspiratorial, there is the distinct possibility that this is funded by the Chinese government. This is not to say that no real people watch Professor Jiang, but it is a way to develop social proof and trigger interest. The momentum is the story, a story attractive to regular people.

Another example is Clavicular, a recently infamous livestreamer who, as it turns out, has a much longer and more sordid history across various forums and channels. You may have seen his content, taking the looksmaxxing movement to its natural cartoonish extreme. He was an essential player in merging the world of incels with the world or professional wrestling, a mindrotting chimera where getting pussy is kayfabe.

While Clavicular’s posting career tells the story of a profoundly insecure and self-destructive young man, his meteoric rise has resulted in writeups in Rolling Stone, CNN, and the New York Times. His rise to prominence can also be attributed to bots, but we can drill down even deeper to investigate the system at work. A elucidative video created by Devin Nash details the entire process that takes someone like Clavicular – and dozens of others, including Caleb Hammer and Bobbi Althoff – mainstream.

In the video from Nash he explains how Clavicular had hundreds of clippers inundating the Kick platform with thousands upon thousands of clips. At 50 cents for 1000 views, that ends up being cheaper than buying bots with a much higher likelihood of reaching human viewers. We cannot be certain what tactics the clippers use, and it’s obvious they played some role in this campaign as well.

As a sidebar, relying on bots is a good way to sabotage your future chances at organic reach. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram largely model their distribution off the followers you already have, so if it scans the attributes of your existing audience you run the risk of signaling to the algorithms that you do very well with Bangladeshi men owning 75 phones each.

There exist several networks which gather freelancers to produce and distribute podcast clips, assigning projects with the goal of making content go viral. As a content creator you can approach one of these networks and offer a budget of thousands of dollars to clip their content, deploy the clips from many different accounts run by real people, and play a simple numbers game until something hits.

There are of course creators who achieve this by partnering with a talent agency offering essentially the same services under the hood. Record labels do this every single day with new singles, as do movie studios with their trailers. If you have ever witnessed a music video dropping and have the chance to see the view count within seconds of its release, you may see it launch to 75,000 views. An impossible amount of views. They know what we all know: it is essential to get a baseline viewership over the algorithmic hump so the system recognizes it as something deserving of attention.

These games are played at every level of every media landscape.  

Creators can also replicate this on a smaller scale by employing a team to chop, bedazzle, and post clips designed to punish the algorithm with exposure until something hooks. The point is that it’s no great mystery how one accomplishes this: there is a dollar rate, there is frequency, and there is duration. It operates like any other campaign, with the added benefit of making someone appear relevant in an unpaid feed.

It should be noted that this isn’t a cheat code and the content itself must be remarkable in some way. The staggering number of individuals and groups producing high-value content is staggering compared to where it was 15 years ago, and back then we were all joking about how everybody has a podcast these days.

Here’s a marketing question: “what do you want?” Most people interpret that as “what do you want to do?” but I encourage you to pull at that thread. You may think the answer is “help people” but it’s more a desire to be respected as a messianic figure. That more accurately describes the status you are looking to achieve by doing all these other tasks.

Switching lanes, ask yourself what you want and the answer might be “persuading real people.” You don’t just want adulation through inflated data, you want to be sure that you are connecting to humans and making an impact. How do you define a real person? When we say bots we don’t just mean scripts, we mean fake accounts run by real people who still technically view and engage.

We are here redefining the “real.” So, what do we mean by real?

Let’s return to the penultimate question of “what do you want to do?” You say you want a bigger audience. Wonderful, let’s pin that to the side. What do you want? You decide, having wisely read this article, that you want to get in front of real, honest human beings. Then you realize you want to be in front of important people, men of consequence. Following that, you might claim your true mission is to educate these people, then you might refine this mission and say that you want to help these people. You can help people for free of course, and you can help them with a private network, especially one of impressive scale. But that’s not what you want, is it? As we hack away the foliage and creep through the vines, we discover what you really want is to be respected as a messianic figure. We can do that, but that’s different. That changes the angle of approach, and perhaps it reveals you need to be creating something new entirely.  

This is the type of discussion people are having in their mastermind groups.

No amount of money, awareness, or algorithmic support will help boring channels take off. You can’t just hurl capital at anyone and make them a star. Channels who don’t have an acute sense of where their niche could be will be boosting and turning up their own volume into it becomes desperate. The ones who want to make a serious run at content creation as a career, however, are forced to adopt strategies such as this to break their signal through the noise.

Influence Networks

Don’t get it twistcucked: it is possible to produce a post, image, or episode that goes viral without juicing it with paid networks. Hell, one of my posts went viral just the other day, garnering 200k views on X and thousands of engagements. This post was low effort (disgusting) and in response to a post on Reddit (disgusting) that was in all likelihood a troll comment (disgusting). Simply an embarrassing affair at every level. This is not life.

Your favourite content creator is in a group chat right now figuring out how to ping more whoppers like this over the fence. The biggest names you can muster from X, SubStack, YouTube, and beyond are in one or several private groups where they ruminate on the latest discourse and debate how to respond to it. I would know because I am in several.

“Dimes if you know how to be popular, why aren’t you?” – Guy Who Doesn’t Read Vanguardist Journal

This has not necessarily helped me of course, because I drop out for weeks and then submit commentary that I believe to be worthwhile to the deafening silence of my cohort. I am also generally alienating and disagreeable.

What goes on behind the closed doors of these chats? The goals are varied – often unspoken – but it’s generally the same as the paid clip networks. It’s the inevitable consequence of the algorithmic sands shifting beneath all our feet.  People who take their work seriously are strategizing on the best path forward. They are collaborating on coordinated responses to trends. They are workshopping takes. They are asking each other what type of content they should be producing. Most importantly, they are boosting each other’s content to their own audiences.

These groups are invite-only, and they coalesce around central personalities, typically whomever creates them. This does not make them the leader, and I have witnessed middling talent attempt to raise their status by being the facilitator for larger names. These power-nodes are more likely to harbor a narrative agenda, even if they do not include it on the masthead.

The boosting of content is the most immediate benefit, and I have known individuals who have fallen out of the good graces of these groups who saw their viewership plummet because they no longer had the immediate distribution of their former collective. The reason they do this is virality is easily assured if there is a positive response very fast. You can have your work fall into the hands of a massive account that blasts you to a new audience and it spreads from there, but one important parameter of the algorithm is that a piece of content should show immediate response – either positive or negative, expressed through engagement – very quickly. On Instagram the threshold is the first 90 minutes. For X it’s the first 30-60 minutes. During this time, you may notice that your content is not even reaching the minimum of your follower count, and this is by design.

How many times have you checked in with a creator you made the conscious decision to follow, wondering if they disappeared since you haven’t heard from them in a while, only to discover unbeknownst to you they’ve been active the entire time?

All social media platforms have long since moved beyond serving content to the followers of channels; what they prefer is having users locked into feeds that show them a mix of content they believe is tailored to their interests, including from channels adjacent to the ones they follow and some content far beyond their desire. They will show you content they suspect you hate simply because you have negatively engaged with it in the past. The common denominator here is engagement that is immediate. If your post, when delivered to a few hundred of your own followers, experiences sufficient immediate engagement, only then will it be delivered to a larger share of your own followers.

We are far removed from the days when someone could record a video essay, upload it to YouTube, and trust that the platform would serve it to people who would have an interest in that sort of thing. These were the salad days of hashtags. Hashtags don’t matter anymore.  Everything is controlled by an algorithm that increasingly favors engagement whether positive or negative. The system is designed to locate the most immediately sensational sentiments and amplify them.

What drives people to join one or more of these clandestine groups is the unfortunate requirement to hack the system however they can just to be seen. Many of them understand they need as much help as they can get during those first key moments of posting something, perhaps something they invested significant time and effort into. They might also be seeking advice on what content “works” and why theirs isn’t “working.” Even if you forego paid promotion, it appears impossible to reach the upper stratosphere of influence without these sorts of affiliations.

This is where the power nodes thrive: they understand the need for networking, they know most creators do a poor job at brokering these relationships themselves, and they understand the value of having a space where these individuals can discuss such things openly without the appearance of manipulation implied by ownership of the space. This is how the power nodes can exert their own influence; they can introduce their own narrative suggestions or encourage members to circle the wagons due to some manner of eDrama or otherwise guide the conversation in a direction that benefits them. If after such a time members do not appear to be a team player, well…

So, while creators can take the initiative to boost their own numbers, they can also organize communities to generate interest, each centered around an agent of soft control. There exists a tier above this which can make every aforementioned strategy subordinate.

Patronage Spheres

I have explained some key (but not all) strategies for how individuals or groups can make their content succeed in breaking through to general audiences. Once you understand the mechanics, it’s much easier to imagine how individuals of wealth or political import can wield them to achieve their ambitions. All you need to do is provide the funding.

Everyone is aware of wealthy patrons who distribute funding to creators, groups, or organizations they wish to exert some measure of control over. Names that jump to mind are Peter Thiel, Tenet Media, George Soros, or the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Jeffrey Epstein (the New York Financier) was certainly involved as a slice of his overall investment portfolio, although to what degree is murky. The cases of individuals are notorious, but the organizations are rarely top-of-mind.

I have personally known a handful of individuals who received Thiel Grants, and there’s even more out there who lie about it. The grants are often distributed to the tune of thousands of dollars for specific projects – art shows, documentaries, magazines that align with the culture he seeks to promote and control, etc. The ROI for these investments isn’t financial, and while I cannot divine the personal motivations of these whales in every instance, it’s obvious these individuals struggle to accomplish these tasks on their own. Many of them are socially jarring, downright upsetting on camera.

They don’t know how to write a book, host a party, or get people on their side. Further, they see an emergent social trend and treat it like every other upward leap on a line graph, whispering to the screen that they need to get in on that.

This direct investment is simple enough to track for those with prying eyes. What proves more complex is tracking the distribution of capital funding narrative control across multiple firms.

Data Republican produced a highly illuminating website that endeavors to graph the nodes and edges tracing how money flows from the government, large private investment blocs, and charities towards politically affiliated non-profits, news sites, and individuals who would otherwise struggle to stay solvent.

The above capital pathway shows how in one instance money flows from “Fidelity Investments and Charitable Gift Fund” through two unaffiliated recipients before it ends up at the “San Diego Lesbian Gay Bisexual,” a non-profit reporting gross receipts of nearly six million dollars. The money then goes to staff salaries and whatever projects – or persons – they deem necessary.

There are hundreds of other cases we could dissect, and this is the process through which many large Antifa groups receive funding. The beginning of the chain need not be the instigator of the conspiracy; oftentimes it begins with a family trust or a philanthropic foundation who want to be able to say they spread their money to the stewards of positive cultural causes. It has long been claimed that the Right suffers a dearth of patronage, but the response could be it lacks organizations. It lacks real projects.

I’m not saying that, but someone did or is.

I was speaking to a friend on the topic of Antifa’s network structure, and indeed whether or not Antifa even exists as a coherent organization. One thing he pointed out was if you break down the nodes on the graph, they are still real businesses that pursue measurable goals. One such example is Food Not Bombs, an outwardly Leftist organization and open Antifa affiliate that reports hundreds of locations across the planet. Putting their political agitation to the side, what is it they actually do? What they do is coordinate volunteers to show up all over impoverished areas – high conflict areas – and provide basic food necessities such as rice and beans. They give away free food in ghettos and countries where children on meth are working in government. Is anybody you know committing their time to personally distributing rice and beans to poor people, or are they on Substack talking about how everyone in the world is wrong about Rome?

Right now these patrons are buying up segments of the discourse, and my concern is the recipients are unaware of what they are selling.

Taking refuge under the umbrella of a benevolent aristocrat sounds enticing, especially if you are struggling. I would advise that person not to be so eager to hop into the pocket of a billionaire. They are far better at having money than you are at being broke, and they have a laser focus on their return on investment.

You don’t get investment for what you are currently doing, you get investment for what you could be doing in the future and that applies both to growth but also messaging. It won’t happen right away; whomever it is will allow you to acclimate to your new lifestyle, to a comfort you never thought you could enjoy. You can get loans soon because you can prove that steady income. You made a few big purchases, you got a new condo, maybe you upgraded your car. One day you get pinged to weigh in on a specific topic, to lend your razor-sharp wit. You get pinged again regarding a post you made, a careless post that is causing problems. Do them a favor and delete it. You’re not going to risk your career over trivialities, right?

You’re so distant from the real. One day you snap out of it and ask yourself, “what is it I’m even doing now?”

You know the real question you should ask yourself, but it’s too hard.