Thousands of PewDiePie Fans Have DIED

A HUGE NUMBER OF THOSE SUBSCRIBERS ARE JUST CORPSES NOW! It's becau- woah, woah, woah, woah. So a few years ago I did some research and based on the regions, genders, and areas of my audience at the time, I determined that statistically the most likely name among them was Emily. So I can say, hey, Emily, how's it going? And I know I'm addressing a good chunk of you directly. That is statistics and big data at work. But let me throw this at you, have you ever thought about PewDiePie? You know he has 55.1 million subscribers, right? So statistically, a good chunk of those people are dead. It's a statistical near certainty that a large chunk of that population have vacated the mortal coil. Whether it was natural causes, they got hit by a bus, suicide, they're gone. And all we see for quite a while is an inactive YouTube channel. Given the right data sets and a bit of an imagination, you can do all kinds of cool stuff. And people are. If you're into foraging, there are websites like fallingfruit.com that catalog the trees and types of fruits that are falling across America. You can go pick up the fruit needed. We're using data from hundreds of thousands of people who wear bras to help fit the bras of the other hundreds of thousands of people who need them. And we're using information about where people are and how far they're walking and where they like to congregate to help them catch invisible monsters with their phones. YouTube and I, we're collecting information about you. I'm collecting information about myself. And we can use that information to do all kinds of things. And this really only started picking up speed in the last three or four decades. Back in the 40s and 50s, we had what was known as the information explosion. Surveys and different types of census and printing and travel were helping us understand more and more about the people that lived in our countries. So much so that by the 60s, we've got scholars like B.A. Marron and Paul Domain predicting that we need to figure out ways of compressing information if we're going to survive with it all. Guess what, Paul? You were right! It came true! We figured it out! By the 1990s, the conversation has shifted from how do we store all the information to what do we do with all the information? We've stored so much! We're great at storing! ------- ace at storing! But what do we do with it? To quote in a 1990 paper by Peter J. Denning called Saving All the Bits, It is possible to build machines that can recognize or predict patterns in data without understanding the meaning of the patterns. The same machines can also pour through existing databases looking for patterns. And oh ----, Petey, that's exactly what we did! The birth of SQL, Web 2.0, databases everywhere! And suddenly everyone and his granddad has a database and is collecting information about stuff. And websites are no longer just written like books, they are representations of these databases. You're not just going into text editor and writing open triangle bracket head title equals quotation mark my cool website end quotations end triangle bracket. Instead you're putting all your content and the information about that content into a database and then you're telling some kind of CMS to generate a page based on what's there! And that's the point in the timeline where it gets really interesting for me. Because suddenly everyone has this power. Not to the degree that huge statistics and research companies do, but still we have access to the same kind of technology. And what's more by using it and participating in it and encouraging others to use it, we are training ourselves and being conditioned to see the world as data. Likes and hearts and favorites only exist because they are easier for an algorithm to understand than a long-form human opinion. Emoji version 9 lists a total of 1,088 emojis which sounds like a lot, but it is so far fewer expressions than there are words. This democratization or at least semi-democratization of big data is something that skeptical science fiction from the previous century didn't really get right. A lot of sci-fi authors got a lot of things right, but what Orwell didn't quite see was the degree to which we would all be doing it ourselves. In the words of Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino, we all Big Brother now. And we can do ridiculous, stupid, manipulative, evil, good, positive, happy things with that data. It's sometimes a currency, sometimes a raw ingredient, sometimes a motivator. My data in this context, the analytics that YouTube collects and is nice enough to let me look at, tells me that a huge chunk of the people watching this video are studying at a college or university level. So what am I going to do about it? Maybe one of my upcoming videos should be advice for students. And maybe Felix spends too much time pandering to all his Alive subscribers. Maybe he should take a moment to make something that would really appeal to his dead demographic. For that matter, what video games do bots like? I think they make up a not insignificant chunk of the PewDiePie fanbase and they should be represented. But that's enough from me. I'll leave you with a question I want answered in the comments. What are you going to do with the data you collect? And don't tell me you're not, because you are.