I don't see why you should put your face in his video if he isn't sharing the money. It sounds like he wants free labor to me.

My sister is so into this mindset but doesn't do anything about it, it's so annoying.

Every conversation with her ends up being about how to monetize something. Fucking A, I'm not gonna start a food blog and sell ads, I just wanna make dumplings!! I'm not gonna stream my boyfriend and I playing games, we're just trying to relax! I'm not a brand or a product I'm just a person, get off it.

do it in exchange of a share of the profit. nothing turns people off like sharing.

The job market sucks and it's only getting worse. A full-time job doesn't provide the same standard of living it did for previous generations. I don't like how there's so much pressure to have a side hustle that makes money versus just having a hobby you enjoy, but for some people that's their only option. But I don't hate them, I hate the system.

That being said, it wasn't cool for him to include you in his video. You have every right to push back and avoid this in the future.

Just tell him no, tell him you don't want to be on his social media.

I do indeed hate living under capitalism

I do a lot of things for fun that I could theoretically make money from. I model and 3d print stuff, I woodwork, I make electronic projects, I'm a musician, and a software engineer.

Sometimes I'll get people saying stuff like "you could sell XYZ". I tried it. I had an Etsy store where I sold my 3d prints. It was successful. Too successful. I was working my day job and then spending most of my free time printing and sanding and painting and talking with customers and dealing with shipping.

Initially I thought how great to be able to spend all my free time doing something I enjoy. In the end i thought how dreadful it is to spend basically all of my time working.

It fucking sucked. I'm glad to have had that experience, but now I know It's actually super important to have hobbies that are just hobbies.

The problem isn’t TikTok or YouTube—it’s some guy at work who felt entitled to use you for his side hustle. If someone treats you like a prop instead of a person, you don’t owe them compliance, and you don’t owe bystanders an explanation either.

It does suck. Watching all my highschool friends slowly lose the light in their eyes as the economy tightened its grip, becoming all more desperate just for basic necessities. The only way any of us can fix this is by making sure no one is run ragged by the fear of this fake ass scarcity.

I've been a computer nerd since I was like 10. When I was younger (damn, am I that old already?), I used to install PC games for friends (including ahem cracks). I always did it for free just, well, because they were friends, and because it took no longer than 10 minutes in the worst case. Their parents always threw a few bucks my way anyway, which I always tried to refuse, but ended up taking because of their insistence.

I also started contributing to open source from a relatively young age (I think I was maybe 20), not with the intention to make a career out of that, but because I found it a fun activity, and liked my contributions helping people.

In both cases, my family was all over me for not making a career from that. Like, my brother in Christ, I don't need to be fucking working 24/7 from birth to death. People are allowed to do things just for fucking fun.

It’s mad annoying. You’re not even being paranoid, there have been several cases lately where these wannabe celebrities refuse to back off after being politely refused. Problem is they’re the ones filming so they harass you then just start the clip around when you start getting pissed off lol. Then somehow they all have an army of like a thousand angry men who will send you death threats irl over your ‘mistreatment’ of their favorite influencer

It's infuriating when you look at the online content creator landscape:

Everybody's got a course. Everybody's sponsored. Every channel pitches scams with a promo code. Even many anti-capitalist channels are pushing you to sign up for some program. It's absurd.

Sometimes I get annoyed at the crowd that sees me doing something they think is cool and be like "you could sell or provide [x hobby]"

That sounds like an awful workplace. Why is some bell end cajoling you into tiktok videos at work? Fuck that. I'd be off if I worked with twats like that.

Maybe ask some of your coworkers for help demonetizing, brainstorm hobbies with no payoff or audience to grift, put on a reflective HV vest or hat to screw up advertising slop commentary videos, play licensed popular music, swear and refer to drugs and ask people on camera how much they make, leave copies of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness in the break room.

I dislike it too. I'm not surprised at all. I'm not the brightest but the one thing I'll lay claim to is having seen this train wreck the whole way. Our generations were raised to be hyper-individualist neoliberals. It's everyone for themselves and we're all worse off for it. We're crabs in a bucket.

I didn't have those words to conceptualize it as a kid but I saw it in the way we've been pit against each other since the beginning. It's an unsustainable model. I'm not surprised the state of the world, especially the economy today.

What I don't get is if everyone is so smart then why am I the only one that seems to be seeing it. Operative word being "seems". I know a lot of other people see it too. As evidenced by whole posts like this.

But as a collective. We're supposed to be the most educated and most open minded generations ever (in terms of breadth of knowledge, not political leaning). Yet we seem to be regressing to worse off states of being than ever. What the hell is even that about?

No, I don't buy into blaming the "boomers". They voted for what they wanted collectively. Collectively. Everyone accuses them of being selfish. If anything our generations are just as selfish. I personally think we're more.

I don't buy into blaming the top 0.01% either. They are a product of our collective obsession with money and materialism. I do blame much of the top two-digit percentages. I really don't care if you're a multi-milionaire or soon to be worlds first trillionaire. You're all running the same race. Just with different scores. A butterfly flapping its wings could have just as well re-arranged those musical chairs to put anyone at the top.

The younger generations have the voting power now. But there's always excuses designed to dodge the truth. Whatever we're upset with about the world today is our own responsibility now. The truth is it sucks because too many of us are making it suck.

I do a lot of open source contribution on my spare time because I think it's fun and I like to contribute to software that is open and free for anyone to use. I have several friends and co-workers that think I'm stupid for not only work on projects that pays me.

I'm happy as long as I get to write code for fun and also contribute to the world. That is it's own reward.

I'll answer your question and provide my valuable insights after you subscribe to my Patreon

Is it just me or does posting videos to try to get views FEEL even slimier than standard capitalism? I sometimes ponder starting an influencer channel and immediately find it feels grosser than it does to offer a service/product for money. Just my perception?

Did he ask you to sign a model release for being in his video? Did he offer payment for your work?

The issue is basically that profit is just defined by a money transaction and that is completely unrelated to the quality of values on which it is being conveyed, pecunia non olet.

There are for sure virtuous enterprises which generates values for humans, but the large part of them deals in vicious transactions which by design only exploit humans for profit instead.

If we want progress and we want a free economic system then the coin must be one and only, and it must be directly connected with the effects on the wellbeing of each fellow human.

Not really. People are in really bad spots and need money. While I roll my eyes at grindbros and hustle culture and all this pointless/asinine tiktok influenza crap, it's pretty disingenuous to deny that people actually do need additional income outside of their main job.

That said, what you have described seems pretty annoying.

My regular job schedule is rotating 12 hour shifts. We work 3 or 4 days/nights in a row, either 0400 to 1600 or 1600 to 0400, and then get a few days off to flip sleep schedule to do it again on the opposite shift. The benefit to this schedule is that every 4th week, we're scheduled 7 days off in a row. But because of vacations and callouts, it's pretty common to have to come in on days off to cover.

We also have two times per year for about 3-8 weeks where everybody would 6 or 7 day weeks. That's 72 or 84 hours in a week. And because we're hourly, that's very good money, but because the cost of living is so high in the area most of us are commuting about an hour each way. So every 12 hour day is roughly 14 hours away from home. So those times of year are really 84 or 98 hours per week away from home, and a week only has 168 hours.

The work itself is also fairly demanding. We don't just sit at a desk. We are climbing ladders, carrying heavy shit around, shoveling, turning valves, running to respond to alarms, etc. A light day is still a day at the gym.

Despite this, there is an absurd amount of pressure to come in a significant amount more for training or you'll never get a promotion. And a lot of my coworkers seem to be happy to do that.

Idk what they're doing with their time outside of work, but it seems like they can't possibly have time for anything meaningful. I don't understand the point of chasing money that hard if you don't give yourself any time to spend it. I keep talking myself out of spending on things I want because I know I won't actually spend any time enjoying those things, so I'm just sitting on a useless pile of money and working at a place that's trying to push me into trading even more of my time for even more useless money. And nobody seems to see the problem. I'm glad that my bills are paid and everything, but how the fuck is this different from being a slave that's housed and fed?

All I do is work and sleep, and I'm expected to work even more, and I'm surrounded by people who think I'm crazy for not pulling 60+ hours every week. That sort of schedule is what somebody who hates their family does, and I happen to like my wife.

While it‘s obvious that one income alone won‘t feed a family anymore, our culture pushed multiple-job-holding even further by normalizing several income streams and especially gig-work. A gym nearby now advertises „earn 1€ per workout“, which is effectively just a discount, but gives you the feeling of actual profit

there are a lot of youtubers and tiktokers that dont do it for the money

i learned how to code from a pretty young age
Every time i particupated in a game jam or made a game or any other coding related project, i was asked by my parents if i made money from it
I was like 12 years old; i hated that

that's what living in a capitalist society looks like.

Yeah kinda. But people value different things. I value time so work less hours at work and take an easy stress free job. I could earn double if not more working elsewhere but at what cost.

If I’m housed, watered, and fed then the next thing I want is time. I love my job and still hate going to work and I work from home. I hate the idea of giving so much of myself away for Monopoly money.

No. I hate the fact that the world has forced people to need to do so.

This really just goes to show how strapped everyone is. If all you ever think about is needing to make more money, you’re struggling.

Imagine if we get a robust universal unconditional social dividend atop a properly adequate "basic income", accompanied by high quality free-to-use social services (including transport)... then we could:

Do what we're good at, what we love doing, and what needs done, fulfilling our passion and mission, not just our profession and vocation.