If you google the question of whether or not Kristen Leo is (still) vegan, one of extremely few search results you'll find lies within this same Patreon page that you're reading now: there's an inaccessible video from September 10th of 2023 entitled The End of Philosophy: Kristen Leo is Ex-Vegan. https://www.patreon.com/posts/end-of-kristen-89080118
Catherine Klein, circa three days ago, decided to state as a matter of fact that Kristen Leo is now ex-vegan. It would seem to be a matter of conjecture and inference rather than a matter of fact, but nevertheless: Kristen Leo has long since ceased to be an advocate for the vegan movement, and now describes her diet in terms of "vibrations" rather than moral or ecological principles. Whether we should consider an act of murder "high vibrational" or "low" is a very philosophical question indeed —the sort of thing I can imagine Callimachus disputing with Socrates.
Apparently it is not even worth mentioning (in this avalanche of news on an otherwise silent slope) that Kristen ceased to be committed to a childfree future. Now, instead, she says that she's planning to get pregnant and raise children as soon as possible. Her old videos on this subject always seemed close enough to antinatalism to my ears, and she makes an appearance in my satire Antinatalist Woman as a result. This can still be seen and heard on Spotify, although not on youtube any more.
Buying, selling and wearing leather is not vegan: as with the example of Hitomi Mochizuki, i.e., one of Kristen's friends and fellow DePop mavens discussed (and satirized) on à-bas-le-ciel many times before, Kristen never was entirely vegan. Both of them traded in leather and wool. Doing it via a website like DePop does nothing to dilute the sin in question, but only creates a durable record of the transgression for your vegan fan base to boggle at in horror. Through some strange act of self-hypnosis, the fans of both Kristen and Hitomi went for many years without boggling.
Meanwhile, now as never before, Kristen has made herself the laughingstock of her carefully curated crowd of Communist supporters by encouraging them to invest in a peculiar cryptocurrency that will somehow end up "supporting" her (through a mechanism that is entirely unclear to me) as she endures a period of poverty and uncertainty living in Los Angeles. Yes, it is now Los Angeles, rather than Florida or Athens or Pico Island. And yes, Kristen used to court a Communist fan-base with the usual mix of semi-literate Marxist and semi-numerate anticapitalist tropes. The problem with pandering to left wingers is that you can never be left wing enough to suit them, and you end up not being left wing enough to suit yourself. Please do not ask me what the equivalent problem with pandering to a right wing audience might be: I will be banned from Patreon if I explain it in reply.
The parallels to James Aspey's career go further than just that: both Aspey and Leo convinced themselves that they could rapidly rise to the top of the livestreaming food chain, without questioning the difference between a chain and a ladder. The rent would be easily paid, they imagined, once they transitioned from uploading edited videos to inviting the audience to participate in utterly unedited monologues. Aspey quickly abandoned this dream on Youtube; Leo, in parallel, abandoned it on Twitch.
I have experience making many hundreds of pre-recorded videos, and many hundreds of livestreams: the main difference between the two categories is that it is impossible to delude yourself as to just how stupid the members of your audience really are when you switch to livestreaming. Sky's Vegan of Course show provided endless examples of this: he had a small number of unemployed people returning day after day (some of them retired, some of them mentally disabled and receiving benefits, etc.) with greater degrees of audience participation making the performance seem more and more like a freak show. I do not know if he deleted his old episodes under pressure from an old employer (PETA?) or under pressure from an ex-girlfriend, but you can see that he is still trying to upload on a daily basis after an inexplicable "renovation" of his enterprise: https://www.youtube.com/@skyjackmorgan/streams
You have to be honest with yourself about why you're doing this. If you start a Discord discussion group: do you actually want to talk to the kind of person who spends three hours per day on Discord? Perhaps you don't yet know what kind of person that is, and you're going to find out.
Likewise, although you may find my recent reflections on the average level of intelligence to be found amongst the audience shocking, please ask yourself:
• What kind of person can spend three hours per day watching Twitch streams?
• Do you want to spend your life babysitting that kind of person?
For years, I uploaded book reviews for the purpose of attracting and communicating with the kind of person who was intelligent enough to read the same books and have their own (interesting) critique of them. I really would have been better off uploading hardcore porn, given that booktube is really just softcore porn. And, yes, some of my satirical rap songs and comedy videos reflected on this tension in my life at the time (but it is a tension that began when I struggled to upload book reviews in Kunming, where I was a full time student of Chinese, etc., and I was then very disappointed by the quality and quantity of what I received from the audience in reply). As cynical as I may have seemed, I wasn't cynical enough. As dim a view as I may have had of my own audience, it wasn't dim enough. And I imagine that Kristen Leo and James Aspey (and Sky, too) had to endure a similar sort of disappointment. Indeed, to some extent, based on what they've said themselves, I know it to be true. Put yourself in the position of a newspaper columnist who suddenly switches from creating content for an idealized reader to actually interacting with his or readers on Twitch and Discord. It's quite a cliff to fall off of, that one.
As it is the patronage of "the Pi Network" that Kristen Leo is courting, I should note that there are peculiar reasons why participants worry that this particular cryptocurrency might be a scam. One of the central promises of the cryptocurrency movement was that these monetary substitutes would allow anonymous transactions unfettered by government oversight. This is often described as liberating customers from the limitations of banking, gold or paper currency, but it is in fact a promise that can only be construed in contrast to credit cards. Credit card purchases are never anonymous: they can always be traced back to a real person who has presented their credentials to a bank teller at some point —and they are an "immortal" record of your consumer activity. If Matt Gaetz had paid for prostitution in cash, the world might be a very different place today.
The Pi token has excited tremendous suspicion and hostility (even amongst cryptocurrency supporters) because it requires that you provide and verify your personal information: it has, in its own idiom, a "KYC" procedure. Although each and every cryptocurrency attracts some allegations that it could be a scam, Kristen Leo's chosen cryptocurrency is harshly criticized by the very people who are most accustomed to making excuses for cryptocurrencies in general. It just isn't clear why the Pi network is gathering all of this data on its "beneficiaries" —I can't call them "users" because the token doesn't have any "use". From one perspective, the Pi network's "KYC" would make a cryptocurrency more like a credit card, but from another perspective it erodes the "raison d'être" for cryptocurrency as such, and could only be the preamble to some scandal as to how the database of personal information collected ends up being monetized.
Credit card purchases verify your identity far more thoroughly than the process of voting in the United States and Canada. We could, in fact, reduce voter fraud by requiring a credit card purchase of five cents with each plebiscite: a mail-in ballot has no such verification of your identity —and we could create a record of your vote that is as "immortal" as every purchase you've ever made on Amazon. For some reason, there is no democratic interest in this possibility, in our exceedingly democratic times.
Kristen Leo's experience is worth remarking on because it is so unremarkable: there are millions of men and women like her who have been through a similar sort of metamorphosis over the last ten years —some of them repeatedly. Oscar Jenkins, you may recall, was ex-vegan (and eating meat with his Mongolian girlfriend) when he rediscovered my youtube channel and became obsessed with it: his infatuation with my philosophy wasn't his first metamorphosis, but it would be his last.
For people living through the vicissitudes of this sort of transformation, it is no less disturbing than the discovery that god is dead: you discover both that you have nothing to believe in, and that everyone else you know (socially or parasocially) now has no reason to believe in you. Not anymore.
The vegan movement died, and the dreams of the influencers and the influenced alike have died along with it.
Have fun staying poor, Kristen Leo.
