The man who ate until he ate himself

How Audience Capture makes influencers become followers of their followers

Welcome to this week’s edition of Second Guess. Did you know that in the last 50 years, computers have become 1 trillion times more powerful? If you had one trillion dollar notes and stacked them on top of each other, they’d be able to go from sea level to the International Space Station and back 125 times.

And now, to today’s story.

Image source: Margaret Gunning

When I was in university, I did spoken word poetry, got invited to events, and grew popular in some circles. At first, I used to write, recite and perform poems about things I cared about, but as time went on, something changed.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a noticeable change; it was gradual, subtle even. But as I started to get more speaking engagements, especially at campus fellowships and churches, I began to tweak my storytelling style, pulling away from my more introspective storytelling style, and infusing puns, rhymes, alliterations, and wordplay into my poems. With each resounding applause I got, my writing became looser, less creative, more watered down, and more pop-sounding.

I’d started off writing poems that could both live on a page and on the stage but my recitations became more wordplay-heavy as time went on. If you read my “poetry”, you wouldn’t think it was poetry. I aped popular YouTube spoken word artists’ styles just to meet up with demand and gradually lost my distinct style. I knew something was wrong but the audience was clapping and I was reveling in the limelight. It was only towards my final year that I did some introspection and asked myself if I really wanted to continue doing empty rhyming or if I actually wanted to tell stories that mattered.

This brings me to the story of Nicholas Perry.

The rise of Nikokado Avocado

Six years ago, Nicholas Perry was living in New York and dreaming of playing in the pit orchestra on Broadway. But it was difficult to make a living in such a bustling city full of great musicians. He uploaded videos of him playing the violin and talking about his vegan lifestyle on YouTube. Those videos didn’t get many views online either.

Soon after, he renounced veganism, said his beliefs about consuming animal products had changed, and complained about never being “vegan enough” for the "vegan community”. He changed his name to Nicokado Avocado and started posting videos of him eating huge portions of food on YouTube. The audience LOVED IT and Nikocado racked up thousands of views.  

Before long, Nikocado gained thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views. He was one of the first American men to join the mukbang trend, as it was dominated by women at the time, and his sudden fame made him eat more food and post more videos. More people flocked to his comment sections and challenged him to keep eating more food, cheering him on and with each new video, so he consumed even more extreme amounts of food than the previous one. Soon enough, he was chomping down every item on entire fast-food restaurant menus in minutes, on camera.

In just three years, his audience went from hundreds to hundreds of thousands to millions. He became famous by always showing up and performing for his overenthusiastic audience and fulfilled his dream of blowing up—just not in ways he once dreamt.

In 2022, the contrast between two iterations of a character couldn’t be more jarring. While Nicholas was a lean, genteel, health-conscious lad, Nikocado is bizarrely caustic and morbidly obese with a tonne of dangerous health concerns. Vegan Nicholas had a picky diet, but Nikocado eats any and everything in sight. And as Nikokado kept eating for his audience, he ate up Nicholas.

---

How the creator becomes the audience

For people who work in media, PR, and marketing, KPIs often revolve around reaching new audiences and engaging them. These professionals study and analyse audiences to develop engagement systems tha. So many marketing t deliver numbers. Campaigns are launched with the intention to go viral, and influencer culture means industry players are constantly trying new things in new formats to reach and capture new audiences.

A common misconception is that audience capture is a one-way street: the creator creates for the audience. It’s not. The audience also captures the creator.

As human beings, the most basic instinct is feedback. Once a person does something that stimulates pleasurable feedback, they’re more likely to do it again. The more dopamine is stimulated, the more we continue to seek it. Each time a performing artist mounts the stage, they feed on the energy of the crowd. You post a funny video that gets widely shared on Twitter and you want to post more like it.

When you think of such instincts in the context of humans as social animals, you begin to see that we’re constantly evolving our personalities based on feedback. In personal relationships. In marketing, In entertainment. In business. In politics. Each decision we make is based on precedents and educated guesses on the most likely to win people over.

Of course, nuances exist, but the typical formula goes like this: a person/business/group makes/presents/posts/launches something—an idea, speech, content, or decision. When they receive feedback, they act on it. In essence, we’re evolving our personalities/products/creations based on what we perceive our audiences want.

The most interesting thing about our decisions is that we often think these decisions are conscious, but most times they aren’t. Even when we experiment, if our experiments work, we’re more likely to build on such experiments. If they don’t, we cast them away and try new things. We’re likely to keep trying the same things if they get sustained positive feedback. We see it in pop culture every day, in music, in comedy skits, in articles and stories, in events, etc. A certain breakout Nigerian artist comes to mind, but I digress.

Feedback helps us make sense of the world as social beings. But in today’s like-follow-comment world where it is easier than ever to be connected to everyone, there’s a kind of sensory overload that’s befalling us, that human beings were simply not designed for.

In previous generations, human beings built their sense of self and belonging through signals from the family and the local community. But in 2022, those local communities have spread across the world. And so this hyperconnectedness makes it difficult for humans to make sense of it. It’s why a person forgets their phone at home and just doesn’t know what to do with themself. Gurwinder writes:

Gradually we're all gaining online audiences, and we don't really know these people. We can only gauge who they are by what some of them post online, and what people post online is not indicative of who they really are. As such, the people we're increasingly becoming someone for are an abstract illusion.

With online conversations becoming more polarising, it turns out that expressions on the more bizarre or eccentric end of the spectrum typically receive the most attention online. Many influencers evolve their personas in response to the overload of social cues, far more than they would receive in their local communities.

The problem the average creator faces on social media is this: as their audience grows, the indices for audience capture increase, and the easier it is for them to eat themselves. Once we’re performing for a baying crowd, it’s easy to project caricatures of ourselves to meet the demand of growing audiences. Such caricatures usually grow faster than the creator. In many cases, we see downward spirals. As Nikokado’s audience kept growing, both in size and in absurdity, he got more outlandish, even going as far as creating an OnlyFans account for explicit content and calling himself Jesus.

The Hungry Ghost syndrome

There is an ancient Eastern legend of a ghost that had a neck so long it couldn’t enjoy any of the food it ate, so it just kept eating and the food kept passing through the insanely long neck into a bloated belly. It always needed more food to get that elusive feeling. According to Wikipedia, the Hungry Ghost is a concept in Buddhism and Chinese traditional religion that represents beings driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how audiences delightfully consume and spread junk content. The danger for the creator is getting high on said junk and losing themselves to it.

A fun term I’ve been seeing lately is “on brand”. It’s what happens when someone does something they’re known for. When the junk becomes “on brand”, any deviation from the caricature they’ve created, feels disappointing. In an era where “vawulence” has become the order of the day and people show off the most grotesque versions of themselves unprovoked, imagine your favourite combative Twitter personality being kind to someone who disagreed with them on the timeline. Wouldn’t you instinctively think, “Shey this wan dey whyne me?”

All too often, we’ve seen people build personal brands on controversial actions and combative behaviors. And this predictability is what leads to audience capture.

When a person knows they’ll be retweeted for a snarky reply or ratioed for a problematic take, they’re more likely to keep doing it, as it gives them a chance to plug their “hustle” underneath the viral tweet. After all, even negative publicity is publicity.

Nikokado isn’t the only victim of audience capture. Millions of people have been devoured by the public personas they created or attempted to create. in my case, I can’t say for sure how much my audience has captured me and the way I create. But looking back on my campus spoken word days, I had to check myself when I realised I was losing my sauce.

In my final performance on campus, I took a risk and went back to the drawing board: I wrote and performed Storyboard, a story more introspective than anything I’d ever written up until that moment, in a 1,000-seater arts theatre. I feared they might not “get” it, that they might miss the punchline-laden bars I used to spit. I was wrong. I exited the stage to a resounding ovation.

I haven’t done much spoken word since university, no thanks to capitalism, but something I learned was that staying true to self pays. While we think of how to impress our audiences, we must take care not to auto-cannibalise ourselves just for their approval.

In my case, I’m constantly pursuing self-awareness and self-criticism. I love to receive external validation but I must make sure my desire for recognition does not turn me into what people want me to be for them, at my own detriment. Because that would mean that any popularity I received would not be for me, it would be for the persona they made me create and nurture.