Stop Accepting the Premise of Assholes
On morality, journalism, and tone policing
Apologies in advance. This turned into a longer rant than I expected.
Louis Rossmann is not my favorite YouTuber.
Rossmann, a computer repair specialist who has a little over 2 million subscribers on YouTube, has become one of the internet’s pre-eminent voices on behalf of right-to-repair. He’s very smart, very ethical, and very passionate.
He is also, by his own admission, not always the cuddliest guy on the platform. He’s socially awkward and often belligerent. He uses figurative language in ways that rub people the wrong way, like using frequent and graphic rape metaphors where one could argue they aren’t necessary. His videos are, often, not fun to watch.
So, yeah. Rossmann isn’t my favorite YouTuber. But I watch his videos — because, again: Louis Rossmann is very smart, very ethical, and very passionate.
Recently, Rossmann waded into a public dispute between two other YouTube channels in the tech space (Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus). The details of the feud are only vaguely important to what I want to say here, but I’ll break it down (making it a block quote so you can skip it if you don’t need the background):
On December 21, YouTuber MegaLag released a video titled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam. The video, which has now been viewed over 16 million times, was a bomb dropped in the creator space, urging or even forcing dozens of other influencers to react or respond.
One of the allegations in the video was that Honey — a browser extension that is meant to help consumers find coupon codes — will find and replace affiliate links at checkout. Most influencers and media outlets use affiliate links, which tell the vendor where the traffic originated in exchange for a small cut of sales. Honey’s browser extension would hijack the code, replacing it with theirs, during the initial coupon code search.
(For example, if you click on an affiliate link for ECV Analog, and you buy a $20 book from Barnes & Noble using that link, I could potentially make 40 cents or something for being the one who sent you there. In this example, Honey would get that 40 cents without disclosing to anyone along the way they had done so, regardless of whether or not they actually gave the consumer a coupon.)
In the video, MegaLag alleged that Linus Tech Tips — one of the biggest YouTube channels in the technology space with over 16 million subscribers — had known about Honey’s affiliate code shenanigans for years, and failed to disclose it either publicly, or privately to those who might be impacted.
The video also revealed that Honey (now owned by Paypal) appears to have brokered deals with some vendors, offering the opportunity to pay to decide what coupon codes show up in search. This means that not only were they allegedly stealing from affiliate codes (something that has now led to at least two lawsuits), but they were also not providing the promised service to the consumer, to whom they had promised the best deals possible.
After MegaLag’s video went viral, Linus admitted having known about the affiliate scam (as did a number of other YouTubers), but defended himself, saying he never went public with that knowledge for two reasons: one, he believed that consumers weren’t being scammed; and two, he thought viewers would be upset if he pressured them to drop a useful service in order to benefit content creators.
Linus’s video was briefly excerpted in a Gamers Nexus video about the Honey scandal. Gamers Nexus have a long and contentious relationship with Linus, as they have been critical of his practices and ethics in the past. Linus then objected to his characterization in the video, claiming that it was defamatory because he was not given a chance to reply, and because the clip was truncated to remove his second reason. His fans have since tacked on “…and he was singled out, while others knew as well,” which may be the real root of Linus’s frustration, since Gamers Nexus have covered some of his own shortcomings in the past.
Gamers Nexus, taking his message and words like “defamatory” at face value, said they stood by their video and that any further concerns should go through their lawyer, presumably since it seemed Linus was escalating the issue to a place where commenting was likely unwise.
Anyway, that’s when Rossmann waded in, writing a community post that implied that he believed Linus was a manipulative narcissist, among other things (without naming Linus or GN specifically).
After comments got particularly toxic, Rossmann made a video, which I would highly recommend:
As the title implies, the video addresses issues that are deeper than the LTT/GN kerfuffle, although that is the bulk of the video. Like me, Rossmann has trouble keeping things short, and often only gets to the point in the first and last 20% of a post.
If you want evidence of that, go look how few words are beyond the point where I have a subhead saying “the actual point of this post” below.
One of the things that Rossmann points out in the video is that Linus wants to hold Gamers Nexus to journalistic standards of excellence, but doesn’t want those standards held to himself. And, to their detriment, Gamers Nexus appears to have made a good-faith effort to bend their policies and behaviors to these standards, in spite of the fact that Linus has not and presumably will not. Because he doesn’t really believe in holding oneself to a higher standard; he uses it as a weapon to empower himself and disempower his critics.
Rossmann points out that, rather than engaging with the substance of critiques against him (not just in this case, but in others as well), Linus uses the parasocial relationship that entertainers have with their audience to make the whole controversy a mandate on their love for him. It’s not about his failure to disclose conflicts uncovered about a brand he once enthusiastically supported — it’s about how it makes Linus feel when somebody points that out. It’s how they were unfair to him and they aren’t perfect, either.
That leads to the title of this piece, and the absolutely pitch-perfect thesis that Rossmann delivered in that section: “Stop accepting the premise of assholes.” You do yourself, and the discourse, more harm than good by accepting as reasonable the premise of bad-faith actors who wish you harm.
As much as anything else, Gamers Nexus has made their own lives harder by accepting Linus’s premise and acting in good faith to respond to aspects of it (they have, apparently, created a whole database documenting when their investigations did or did not include a request for reply from those being criticized). In a video just posted to his own site, he ignores what they have reacted to, and torches them for refusing to apologize to him, showing that anything short of complete capitulation was never going to make the problem go away.
In Linus’s response (which I will not link here because it’s included as a brief prelude to an unrelated episode of his talk show), he does not address that criticism — he claims not to have watched Rossmann’s video yet at the time of recording — but instead doubles down on the behavior. Much of the response time is spent on a YouTube comment in which Gamers Nexus acknowledged that they “saw” Rossmann’s video (presumably prior to publishing), and Linus whining to the effect of “see? They’re being unfair! They colluded with him!” The video, which opens with attacks on Rossmann and Gamers Nexus, is titled I Just Wanna Do Tech Tips.
Not exactly beating those allegations of being a manipulative narcisisst who always plays the victim, Linus…!
To be clear, there is a serious conversation to be had when it comes to companies/influencers like Gamers Nexus. They specialize in review videos classed as edutainment, but often do more actual journalism than many of their peers in the industry press. They have done invaluable research on a number of topics, and have in fact gone out of their way to call out former advertisers when it turns out they were shady.
In fact, during his initial response to criticism, Linus pointed out that it would have been unrealistic to expect him to go after one of his own sponsors when they were outed as a scam. He likened it to cancelling Monday Night Football to run a 3-hour expose on Microsoft’s Surface tablet.
Rossmann called this out as self-evidently silly, since nobody was asking for a feature-length expose. They just thought maybe he could have made a formal statement on his primary YouTube channel, where he had advertised on behalf of Honey in the past. But I’ll do Rossmann one better, and point out that there is precedent for the kind of feature Linus is talking about.
You might be able to guess where this is going, but just for fun, let’s pretend you can’t, okay?
In November, Gamers Nexus (remember those guys?) terminated a lucrative advertising deal with computer company NZXT, and instead spent time and money to produce an hour-long video about how the company’s rental program is “a scam.”
Yes, really:
So…should they be held to journalistic standards, or is it fair to see their journalistic endeavors as outliers in otherwise entertainment-rooted content? It’s a bit like the question of The Daily Show, which was at one point viewed as having more credibility than most of the mainstream media it lampooned. Jon Stewart and company never asked for that, but they got it, and then they had to reckon with it.
I don’t have a good answer for that, and frankly this isn’t about Gamers Nexus. While I enjoyed their original video on Honey, the bit about Linus was barely an aside, and the fact that it’s now sucked up all the oxygen in the air is strange and counterproductive, in my opinion.
The Actual Point of This Post
Rossmann’s thesis, “Stop accepting the premise of assholes,” is broadly applicable not just to Gamers Nexus but to all of us. If you accept the double standards of those who hold themselves to none, you won’t just lose a bunch of arguments on the internet, but you can lose a lot more than that.
Accepting the premise of assholes and trying to fight them on the terms they set is actually kind of an epidemic right now. It’s been easy to see for a while, although rarely stated as succinctly as Rossmann does. It’s a key feature of our media and political landscapes, where we allow bad-faith trolls to set the terms of the debate and then lose to them because they set those terms in bad faith. Who could have guessed?
It isn’t just in petty internet squabbles (which I cannot believe I gave so much space above). It’s something that we see all over.
One example is the way Trump and other right-wing figures simply have absolutely no shame about being hypocrites. People on the left are forever trying to win arguments by pointing out the intellectual inconsistency on the part of the Supreme Court or Mitch McConnell — but that doesn’t matter to those people. Hypocrisy only matters when certain people do it.
The media buys into this stuff, and you get things like Trump absolutely looting the treasury while we spend weeks debating Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading. Don’t get me wrong — both are bad…but only one of them is covered like a scandal, while the other is treated as an entertaining quirk.
And going back to the beginning — yeah, Louis Rossmann can seem like a blowhard when he talks. He’s passionate, he’s loud, and he misses social cues. But often, his points are talked over by people who just want to bitch about his attitude, or his tone, or how he’s “bad for the cause” because he doesn’t make his arguments in a way that people “want to hear.”
I don’t always “want to hear” the way he makes his arguments, but I listen, because he’s a smart guy who argues about important things. Being slightly uncomfortable for the duration of a YouTube video isn’t much of a price to pay in order to learn something. Rossmann isn’t my favorite YouTuber — that would be somebody like Amanda the Jedi or Allison Pregler — but most of the time, I learn something important when I listen to him speak.
That’s the same kind of tone policing that the media regularly engages in when it tried to appeal to populism. Ignore experts — they think they know better than you! Yeah, Chip? Why do you think they feel that way? Is it because they’re actually experts and not just mouthy assholes?
So, yes — stop accepting the premise of assholes. Don’t let yourself be bowled over by insane double standards.
Since I’ve been very bad about doing this in the past, here’s a batch of links to my existing books, which presumably make great gifts if you are lucky enough to know somebody in one of these niche fandoms:
Best Movie Ever: An Oral History of Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont’s Josie and the Pussycats
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/best-movie-ever-russ-burlingame/1140177148?ean=9798988311720
https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Best-Movie-Ever/Russ-Burlingame/9798988311720?id=9340900023696
https://bookshop.org/book/9798988311720
The Gold Exchange: The Unofficial Booster Gold Companion
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-gold-exchange-russ-burlingame/1143464630?ean=9798988311737
https://bookshop.org/book/9798988311737
https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Gold-Exchange/Russ-Burlingame/9798988311737?id=9340900023696
A Legend In His Own Time: A Fast-Forward Guide to the Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of (with Kevin Allen)
Getting the Fin Right: The Collected Savage Dragon Interviews vol. 1 (with Gavin Higginbotham)
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/getting-the-fin-right-russ-burlingame/1146574344?ean=9798988311744