Took me long enough to come to that realization. People stage videos on the internet and no one cares. People will never care. They have much more interesting things to worry about. I now accept this as a fact of my culture. Roman realized this early. Then Vitaly, Fousey, Ock, Saladhands, etc. They made the strategic switch from Documentary to Reality TV and people ate it up without a single synapse of suspicion.

To be clear, there’s two types of staging. Harmless and Harmful. Harmless is usually something like those Canadian Just For Laughs Gags where it’s an actual practical joke. Fousey’s Yoga Pants thing is a perfect example of a harmless staged prank. How do I know it’s fake? I don’t. You can just feel it if you’re not a moron. Strangers simply aren’t that animated. He’s been proven to hire actors off Craigslist anyway. But that’s besides the point! No one cares. At that point it’s Reality TV and people are happy to be distracted from their lives for a few minutes. Whether or not it’s real, no one fucking cares. On the other hand, Fousey’s Rape Prank, Homeless gives money, or cHaNge tHe WaY yoU tHInK lean more toward harmful staging which I’ll explain why gets on my nerves:

Harmful staging happens when a fuccboi starts out calling it a ‘Social Experiment’ (it’s sCieNcE!) then pretending to be a blind person asking change for a dollar  and having the “strangers” (blurred faces of course) rip him off. OMG! What kind of Fucked up Society do we LIVE in?! clearly deceiving the viewers. You’d think these outraged, naive posts from my own friends & family on Facebook, sharing the video along with it, would settle down after a couple years because maybe people would catch on, but no, they’re still popping up, lately from Saladhands or Zac Efron.

I hate this because I know they’re fake and my friends & family think they’re real. They truly believe they’re real and it completely baffles me. They don’t understand the industry. They don’t understand they’re perpetuating a negative stereotype when they share a fake social experiment that did not actually fucking happen. They don’t understand the creator/prankster crafted it purposely to disgust them, or sometimes to melt their heart, and to then to share it, making them thousands of dollars. They just don’t understand. And that pisses me off.

I’ve already explained all this in this video here. *Fun fact, the first 6 hours after I uploaded this, it got picked up on Reddit and made it to the front page. My friend from high school even texted me to let me know. I was thrilled. About an hour later it was taken down by a network which I can’t name in fear of them fucking me over because they have and will use if they just feel like it, that power. Anyway, the link on Reddit was now worthless. I immediately called the network and figured out who filed the copyright claim (I was clearly in fair use). It was either go back and forth over Youtube’s rebuttal system for the next week OR tweet to the fuccboi and pay him to remove the claim as well as guarantee no one from the network could take it down. To my surprise he responded, I paid him $1500, and after 7 more hours it was put back up, but the trending rhythm had died. Who knows how many views it might have gotten. Of course, at the end of the day, no one cares.

Does this mean LAHWF is going to start staging videos? No. It means no one cares because no one cares. And no one cares at all because no one cares about that. It means I’m getting too old for this cliche, saturated genre on Youtube called Pranks.

You pretentious piece of shit, you think you’re above Pranks Andrew? 

Short answer: Not yet.

I need to get back to practicing piano.

 

Thanks For Reading,

Andrew Hales

1:53am

Los Angeles, CA