As a blogger, I'm interested in new media, and I have a certain obligation to maintain situational awareness in the field. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the self-immolation of a new-media company that seems not to be fully aware that it's in a crisis that needs to be managed. This can lead to some insight for another organization that's in a major crisis, the Roman Catholic Church.
Patreon emerged five years ago as a way to manage and regularize voluntary donations to YouTubers. According to Wikipedia,
Patreon was founded in May 2013 by artist Jack Conte, who was looking for a way to make a living from his popular YouTube videos. Together with Sam Yam he developed a platform that allows patrons to pay a set amount of money every time an artist creates a work of art. . . . Unlike other online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook which use trained algorithms to identify potentially inappropriate content, Patreon's trust and safety team monitors users and investigates complaints of Terms of Service violations. In December 2018, Patreon banned the controversial right-wing personality Milo Yiannopoulos a day after he created an account, and also banned anti-feminist Carl Benjamin because he had made a homophobic statement and said "nigger" in a YouTube interview in February 2018. The move was criticized by atheist Sam Harris and American libertarians who have accused it of being politically motivated. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson announced a plan to launch an alternative service that will be safe from political interference.Wikipedia's take doesn't fully explain the issue, I think because Jack Conte doesn't fully understand YouTube and new media. New media and blogging emerged primarily as a result of the 9-11 attacks, when articulate people with time on their hands became dissatisfied with traditional media's reporting on Mahometanism and terrorism. Blogs like Instapundit became very popular, because they presented an alternate view of Western civilization that was more credible than the squishiness of mainstream media, centrist politicians, and the academic establishment.
YouTube was a development that followed on blogging as bandwidth and computer capacity increased to allow wide distribution of special-interest video. Like blogs that followed the Instapundit model, an important faction of YouTube commentators, like Carl Benjamin and Jordan Peterson, tends toward libertarianism and atheism or agnosticism, although they also emphasize an Aristotelian understanding of natural law even if they don't specifically characterize it that way.
But to call Carl Benjamin or Jordan Peterson "anti-feminist" is about like calling Aristotle "anti-feminist", which of course is what now passes for education at Princeton and Ann Arbor. But this is the crux of the issue. Western elites have moved to embrace a corporate state religion that discounts traditional virtue while privileging favored interest groups as well as Mahometans, apparently because if they're given the leeway to do so, Mahometans will kill Jews and Christians, something the corporate-state elites will generally temporize over, as believing Christians and Jews have never been fully amenable to globalist regimes.
The current difficulty is that the Silicon Valley corporations that make money from YouTube and other new media are manifestations of a global corporate state that operates outside US constitutional protections. Thus they enforce European restrictions on speech within the US whenever they find it convenient, and they regulate speech within the US that the privileged groups favored by the corporate state also find unpleasant.
The heavy-handed cancellation of Carl Benjamin's highly visible account was a blunder. And for whatever reason, Patreon, a relatively minor player, was unable to get YouTube on board with deleting Benjamin's videos, so they remain available, and Benjamin himself continues to use YouTube to advocate on his own behalf. Worse, an even more popular figure, Jordan Peterson, canceled his own Patreon account and announced an effort to start a competing service.
Not only did other highly visible (and lucrative to Patreon) users cancel their accounts as well, but the evidence we have is that thousands of small donors canceled their accounts, so that rank-and-file YouTubers with no direct involvement in the Benjamin controversy found their incomes from donors cut by half or more. In a newly disclosed case, another YouTuber had his account "frozen" for unspecified reasons, whereby donors continued to send money to Patreon, but Patreon did not forward payments to the YouTuber.
The bottom line for Patreon is that donors, whose payments to YouTubers were entirely voluntary, saw plenty of reason not to continue them, with no penalty to them for stopping. The YouTubers took major financial hits for circumstances beyond their control, with their confidence in Patreon destroyed. Mr Conte so far seems not fully aware that Patreon is facing a crisis that could end its existence in a matter of weeks -- instead, he's taken his version of the story to the New York Times. A Rumanian commentator noted that the office shown in the lead photo could hardly seem more like the dreary interior of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
As a person who's worked in badly-run companies, my instinct is that Mr Conte was never cut out to run a real corporation, and he and his team are in way over their heads. A major blunder was hiring a Jacqueline Hart to run the "trust and safety council" -- she canceled Benjamin's account soon after she started at the company -- and then giving her free rein to try to fix the crisis she created. In one disaster, she called a YouTuber ally of Benjamin to try to mollify him. In the course of the call, she asked several times if he was recording it. Well, he wasn't -- he apparently either had a court reporter listening in, or he was using transcription software. The call wasn't recorded, but a transcript of the call immediately became available.
Conte probably lost his chance to salvage the situation when he didn't fire Ms Hart on the spot. Instead, she now stars in a New York Times piece, looking like a slightly less frumpy Angela Merkel. This is the face of Patreon.
What can the Catholic Church learn from this disaster in crisis management? The first step is probably to recognize there's a crisis, and take it seriously. The second step is to be up front, admit errors, and make it plain that the organization is learning from the errors and is correcting them. The third step is to have a credible spokesman -- Comical Ali is not who you want.
A good start would be to get Cardinal Cupich out of the picture.
