The New Reaction Economy

Preface

William Davies’ The Reaction Economy was a great piece. I can see its colour stitched everywhere now. I want to build on Davies’ argument, and sharpen the focus to what I see online.

The Reaction Economy

A few months ago, I ordered my brother to put me on an Instagram tapering program, limiting my access to Instagram behind a passcode only he knew to a maximum of twenty minutes a day. Like Davies, I was left feeling bereft and naked, as any addict does when their drug is taken away. Like Davies, how I was supposed to react to the Instagram Reels my friends sent me, or the photos and stories they posted? Like Davies, being online with no opportunity to react is a bit like being trapped in a shopping mall without any money. It’s cognate frustration is also a bit like owning a store in the shopping mall that no one can spend any money in, because it can be deeply entertaining to watch a friend’s reaction to a post.

The crux of what Davies’ is getting at is a sharp observation that our culture that obsesses over reactions. We are obsessed with a particular type of impulsive, short, emotional reaction that people (apparently) have little control over. We don’t just want to see the thing. We want to see someone else see the thing, and, ideally, we want to see the reaction clearly plastered all over their face. It’s hard to miss it across the entire ecosystem of online content.

Consider some examples:

• Videos of deaf or blind children experiencing sound or sight for the first time.
• College decision reaction videos.
• Surprise reunion videos of a long-distance partner or child showing up unexpectedly.
• Prank channels putting people in odd situations and capturing their reactions. This idea has been a popular TV show since at least 1948 with Candid Camera.¹
• Videos capturing the experience of listening to a song for the first time, the experience of trying a food for the first time, and so on.
• Reaction channels writ large. Reaction channels are themselves a very strange mise en abyme of reaction (there are videos of reactions to someone else’s reaction of a reaction…—the Reaction Economy!), and their virality suggests we have an almost unlimited appetite for them. I will revisit this later.

Why do we like these reaction videos? One answer is that these videos vicariously generate the same emotion as the person we are watching. Perhaps we’ve forgotten what it was like to try a food for the first time, or to listen to our favourite song for the first time. Reaction videos are a way to relive those moments. And what makes these videos especially compelling is the presence of an emotional reaction, because it signals the veracity of their circumstances. If the video was staged, there would be no emotional reaction, so we reason. Davies writes our love of reactions is down to our mirror neurons, which help produce empathy.

The nuance I want to add is that empathy depends on a joint understanding between viewer and producer about the truth-status of what is being shown. We can happily suspend disbelief when something announces itself as fiction. But if we are invited to underwrite a staged scene as reality, the discovery of this can feel like betrayal, e.g. Adrian Gee.² Perhaps this is why animal videos are loved with so little suspicion: a silly cat, we assume, cannot perform authenticity.

So, we enjoy reactions because they appear to give us access to something unmediated: surprise, joy, fear, embarrassment, delight. How should we think about streamers?

Streamers and IShowSpeed

Davies writes that Twitch streamers must be both elite gamers and emotionally engaging performers, but I think this understates things. There is a growing category of streamer whose emotional performance has eclipsed gaming skill as the primary criterion for streaming success.

The streamer Darren Watkins, known as IShowSpeed, is probably the purest distillation of this trend. While Watkins is skilled at playing video games, his most viral moments come from his outsized and often violent reactions to games that require little to no skill. Watkins is famous for the spectacle of his engagement with simple horror games or mobile games like Talking Ben. Notice that the games he plays are instrumental in prompting the real content, which is his emotional volatility and excess, which millions find entertaining and amusing. This is equally true for other streamers like Kai Cenat, Lacy, Braeden, and others who use a variety of guests, dares, stunts, and social situations as catalysts for prompting their own outsized reactions.

Yet, IShowSpeed is a personality Watkins performs when he streams. There is a tension here: if emotional reactions are supposed to be impulsive, free from fakery, and therefore authentic, and we also know that IShowSpeed is not being authentic, surely authenticity isn’t what we’re consuming. It seems we’re consuming the fiction of authenticity, which seems like a version of fictionalism. To instantiate this: just as Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street according to the fiction of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watkins reacted authentically according to the fiction of the IShowSpeed character. And if we’re willing to subscribe to the fiction, we’re entertained. I suppose this is the streaming version of Kayfabe.³ Let’s separate out three types of fiction: (1) declared fiction, e.g. Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes; (2) Kayfabe, e.g. wrestling, streamers; (3) counterfeit authenticity, e.g. fake pranks, undisclosed ads, staged testimonials. A note on (3) below.

Marketing

Companies now pay ordinary-seeming people to advertise their products. Typically, the advert is masquerading as a candid video for a person solved X problem. I’m not a fan of this form of advertising because it launders the advertising through: (1) what we originally take to be the independent opinion of a regular person who is making an unpolished video; (2) a face with an emotional reaction which we instinctively want to watch; (3) usually relies on some sort of fearmongering dynamic. It is, however, highly effective. Examples:

• Fearmongering about college admissions before selling an AI tool that will help you get in.
• Fearmongering about recruiting for internships/jobs before promoting an agency/course/AI tool that will help you recruit.
• Panicked reaction about trying to completing an assignment 2 hours before it’s due before selling an AI tool that will help you write your essays.
• Presenting a dilemma between dating either person A or person B, before promoting a product that will make you look more attractive.
• And so on.

This is the shape of the New Reaction Economy.