7/15/2023 0 Comments Destiny twitch![]() He describes his political identity at the time as “anti-SJW”-against “social justice warriors.” These were days when words like cunt and retard would reflexively exit Bonnell’s mouth, along with what has become a debased salutation on the internet: “Kill yourself.” The comic value of a gag was measured by its repugnance. (The two are now on friendly terms, and Bonnell sees his son often.) This experience, along with the indignities of forgoing college, being fired from a job at which he felt he excelled, and enduring years of profitless, grueling labor, did not soften Bonnell’s combative personality nor lighten his view of the world. But even as his financial prospects improved, Bonnell was painfully withdrawing from a relationship with the mother of his son. Eventually, he quit his job and made streaming a full-time gig, earning more than $100,000 his first year. Bonnell began selling ad space on his channels. You’re really smart for a carpet cleaner.”īy 2011, the streaming industry was rapidly growing. “The worst part about being poor,” he says, “is the understanding that every day is potentially the worst day of your life.” It was during this time that Bonnell received “one of the most hurtful comments I’ve heard.” A customer told him, after chatting with him for a few moments, “Wow. He was paid on commission, averaging $3 or $4 an hour. He spent 12-hour days lugging power scrubbers in and out of a company truck sometimes he encountered water damage and would cut his bare hands on fiberglass insulation he pulled from sodden walls. When the casino money ran out, he took a job cleaning carpets. Although the streaming industry didn’t really exist yet, Bonnell discovered a community of brash young gamers who shared his morbid sense of humor and his penchant for confrontation. “It’s very hard for me to understand other people’s emotional experiences.”Ĭrestfallen, he cashed out his 401(k) and took refuge in videogames and internet culture. “Empathy isn’t something that comes naturally to me,” he says. Bonnell attributes this to his own failure to navigate workplace politics. Within a year, he was fired from his job. Forced to choose between a paycheck or an education, he dropped out of school in 2010. His experience of juggling the two commitments was frustrating, sleepless, and ultimately unmanageable. He learned, he says, to be intensely self-reliant.Īfter high school, Bonnell enrolled at the University of Nebraska to study music while working full time as a restaurant manager at a nearby casino, mostly at night. ![]() His parents moved away when he was a teenager to take care of an aging relative with Alzheimer’s, and he lived with his grandmother until he turned 18. Now 31, he belongs to the first generation for whom it was possible to be raised on videogames-in his case, Japanese role-playing games, whose text-heavy interfaces he credits with making him an adept reader. “I think the path we’re on now sends us to destruction,” he says.īonnell grew up in a conservative Catholic household in the suburbs of Omaha. These realities share no factual basis with each other and thus present no hope of ever establishing consensus. Without that common set of truths, Bonnell says, we enter the dangerous condition of “epistemic polarity.” The idea is that there exists in the United States a variety of decoupled social realities: a reality in which undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers pose an existential threat to the nation and one in which they do not a reality in which vaccines cause autism and one in which they do not a reality in which climate change is a farcical means of social control and one in which it presents a threat to civilization a reality in which a clandestine cabal of Jews subjugates humanity and one in which this is known as a virulent lie.
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