Youtube really crossed a line, this time. In this comment, Scarlett Boswell wrote
"If they sign a liability form stating they will take care of any adverse effects cost then they probably can require them. They are not able!"
to which I replied
What if the adverse effect is death? How do they "take care" of that? This is an experimental medical technology based on gene alteration, not a vaccine in the usual sense of the word, and it has been fast tracked past the usual clinical testing process because the government wanted to cater to an irrationally panicky public. If you take it, you're a guinea pig.
There's nothing that I just told you that is open to serious debate. Find your physician and ask him, and he'll tell you what I just told you. No. The reasonable thing to do is to refuse, and if the school won't accept that, then go on a leave of absence until they come to their senses.
and found that my comment had been ghosted. This is unforgivable. I'm trying to warn this woman of a possible threat to her survival, and this piece of censorware that has been passed off as a spam filter has prevented me from doing so, potentially putting Ms. Boswell in danger. The question is how to respoond to this ethically. If I lived in a world that offered me a great many opportunities to earn an honest living, my answer would be a simple one: I'd boycott Youtube. Permanently. This would have been the breaking point. If I ever do get a real job, this will have been that breaking point. I'll immediately put my channel on indefinite hiatus. But even as somebody who is destitute and can't turn his nose up at the possibility of income, even it involves working with a company I've come to view with loathing, I can still do something and will.
While I do have to make money in order to eat and pay rent, I don't have to make as much money as humanly possible. Therefore, as a user, I can still punish Youtube for what they've been doing. I am a far better mathematician, scientist and engineer than I will probably ever be a story writer or a director. If I were working for Youtube and I noticed that I had me as a user (yes, it's a surreal image), I'd know exactly what sort of content I'd hope that PhD candidate would submit to my company's site. I'd want that kid to submit his technical videos, because that's where the real ad revenue would be. That's the kind of content I will never post to Youtube because of what just happened. Every serious video I do will be posted to another website, and if that means I can't monetize them, oh well.
A site full of almost nothing but goofy, amateurish skits (and the bootlegged commercial some users post) would be a site that nobody would take seriously as a source of medical or other scientific information. I'm not a great writer, but I'm a decent one at least, so the ad revenue I can get from posting non-serious work (stories, recipes) will probably be enough to keep me in rice and beans, while I look for a new place to live. One of the things I intend to do, to help put myself in a position in which I need not make so many moral compromises, is to finally move out of Chicago, to a place with a more reasonable and generally better job market. I used to wonder what living in the middle of a major city would be like. Now I know, and between what I've seen out of the people in Chicago, and our friends from San Franscisco working in social media, I'm thinking that city life, like city people, has long been overrated.
I'm going to try to find myself a nice small college town to live near, not in, get a real job there, and turn my back on woke urban nonsense forever.
