Transcription
When most people think of the dead internet theory, they think of bots and AI, which is definitely a problem, but it isn't the only one. You may still think that you, the human, are ultimately the one responsible for a lot of what your algorithm serves you up, whether that be a new artist you see your fellow music fans talking about, or a new content creator you see on your TikTok feed, or even the discourse around a certain subject.
But what if I told you companies, corporations, and people with an agenda have figured out how to hijack and game the algorithm in a way that artificially promotes whoever is paying the top dollar? And a lot of creators, musicians, and people you constantly see in your feed, even the opinions about these people that you see, are all fake. None of it is real. None of it is organic.
But, what am I even talking about? Recently, I've seen rumblings in the music industry around artists being industry plants or psyops. A more specific example is the rise of the band Geese, an indie band from Brooklyn who have been getting a ton of buzz lately. The group has performed on SNL, Tiny Desk, Coachella, Primavera Sound, and a massive sold-out North American and European tour following their highly praised 2025 album Getting Killed. They were first formed in 2016, but they have had nowhere near this massive amount of success that they've been having lately, which is a major part of what makes their rise so interesting.
How has Geese gone from a relatively unknown band to, in the past year, getting on SNL, performing at Coachella, The Guardian calling them the new saviors of rock and roll, and much more? Well, the timeline for their recent rise starts in late 2025 and early 2026, when tons of music fans started noticing Geese popping up. But it wasn't just here and there. It seemed like they were getting pushed by algorithms at an unnatural rate. Personally, I kept seeing them everywhere, and I was like, "Why does everyone already know this band? What am I missing out on, you know?"
Clips on TikTok and Reels flooded feeds. Listeners started to take notice, and critics started to like what they were hearing. Then, a couple months into the year, the first bomb was dropped. Musician and writer Eliza McLamb uploaded a Substack article titled Fake Fans, in which she exposed a strange connection. It was between Geese and their frontman Cameron Winter and the digital marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects, whose entire goal was to market Geese amongst others in a rather unconventional way.
Chaotic Good's game plan included the innovative use of social media networks to create a wave of artificial fandom appearing as real fans. They used Geese songs to back social posts, shared live footage of the band performing, both of which are pretty normal. These are things you'll see quite often in the music industry. But what was interesting to me was that they also used burner accounts to swirl fan discourse. I found a spreadsheet with a list of alleged fan page accounts used to promote artists or create narratives and I don't know how many of these are actually from Chaotic Good, but they are probably similar to what a lot of these fake accounts look like. A lot of these TikTok pages were also deleted, maybe to try to keep the operation under wraps.
They aren't doing a really great job though cuz I found a Threads post where they said, "If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome." They also had something on their website that they took down called narrative campaigns, which I can imagine is them having these fan pages create discussions or narratives in favor of the artists that are hiring them. This is interesting to me too because as I've covered before on this channel, studies show that if you're exposed to music enough, like a specific song or if you perceive something as popular, you are more likely to enjoy that. Not because it's better, but because uh you just hear it more, so it's like more familiar with you.
So through the distribution of clips and others online seeing this inorganic discourse about Geese, views were generated and with views came a notable and growing buzz, forcing the algorithm to treat this sensation as organic and so it did. Then suddenly the fake audiences, fake discourse and fake narratives became real. These people are essentially proving that it's pay-to-win when it comes to social media, which isn't really fair since most people with music careers can't afford to run these types of campaigns and get their name out there because everything is so expensive.
And that's why today's video is brought to you by Current, a mobile banking app that has a bunch of great features that you should be taking advantage of. For example, you can boost your credit score over 80 points in 6 months just by using the build card that Current hooks you up with. It's a pretty slick card if you ask me. On top of that, they have a savings pot where you can earn up to a 4% bonus on your savings, which is 10 times higher than the national average. They also have two very useful features, one of which is the $750 paycheck advance, and the other can get you paid up to 2 days before your actual paycheck. There's also my favorite feature, which you guys might be familiar with by now, but that's the fee-free overdraft. I just I don't want to have to deal with overdraft fees. That's ridiculous. Of course, Current also has 24/7 live support, which is huge. You know, if you got problems with your money, you don't want to be waiting for answers. So, if you want to access to all of these great features, make sure to sign up at current.com/mattie and use my promo code mattie so you can get a free 50 bucks. Wait a second, I read that wrong. You actually get $75, so that's an extra 25 free dollars courtesy of yours truly. You're welcome. Take advantage of it immediately. Thanks again to Current for sponsoring this video, and let's continue.
These methods probably sound a little dystopian. I know that word's overused, but I feel like that aptly describes this, and it maybe sounds like something you'd hide if you were chaotic good. But, surprisingly, they didn't. Instead, Chaotic Good went on a media run where they bragged about the successful and aggressive form of marketing they were doing. "What we've done at Chaotic Good is kind of really think through what it means for like a feed to be algorithmic, and that really, really changes what your approach should be. So, it's a lot more volume, it's a lot more thinking about niches, and it's a lot more kind of like hand-to-hand combat. We are kind of studying the internet and TikTok and seeing what's working organically and then trying to recreate it at scale inorganically."
"We use the term trend simulation. Sometimes artists get lucky, they post a song and it goes viral. And so, what we're doing is going and looking and studying what actually happened. Then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral, we apply that to it. And so, we say we're kind of simulating a trend."
But, it didn't end there. Chaotic Good went as far as to list their clients on their website, a list full of fast-growing names that wouldn't be public for too long. There were a few names that I was surprised to see. Artists such as Two Friends, who I'm a pretty big fan of, Tiffany Day, who I've been seeing everywhere lately, and Mumford & Sons which is especially strange to me. That's because Mumford & Sons has been popular for a while, but since 2009 they've been experiencing a relative down period compared to their peak until recently. It's hard to trace when exactly the band began to work with Chaotic Good, but it wouldn't be surprising if they've been working with him for a while.
Similar to Mumford & Sons, not a ton of info is available about when the other two artists started working with them, but some fans on Reddit as early as 2024 began to notice that 2 Hollis was growing in a strange way. One user said, "Anyone notice how before the release of Boy it was really quiet, and now TikTok/Reels is filled with content on him? A lot of the pages have few videos, and randomly one video about 2 Hollis with a lot more views than the others. Notice how all these official fan pages show up. What the [ __ ] is an official fan page? Something ran by management? Notice how Nate Siv is following the same scheme, but with lower intensity. I swear I'm not schizo, I just know that I've never seen such a spike in growth in such a short time."
However, to be fair, Chaotic Good was formed in 2025, so maybe he was using just a similar strategy independently or with another company. In Tiffany Day's case, it's believed that she joined in 2026, and since then she's faced some backlash for the team-up. Obviously, there's some simple explanations for why these artists are trending upwards right now, and it's usually because they dropped some new music, and the music is good, it's doing well commercially. But the focus of this is how these albums, artists, songs are becoming so popular in the first place. All three of these artists have had recent spikes in popularity within the last year, and have all partnered with Chaotic Good. Correlation isn't quite causation, but it's definitely interesting to note.
Personally, I've seen Tiffany Day across my YouTube recommended and TikTok quite a bit lately. Then 2 Hollis are just a bunch all over short-form content in the last couple of years. And Mumford & Sons, well, they've been popular and are far from my algorithm, so I don't typically see them unless it's a hate video or meme video with one of their songs, which who knows, even that could be coordinated. It's possible that Chaotic Good is making co-worker music posts about Mumford & Sons to farm streams from all the hate.
However, the geese story is what brought a ton of attention to Chaotic Good. And after the original exposé article was dropped, the Geese story started gaining some serious traction. And because of the backlash that came with it, only a day later Chaotic Good started covering their trail. They removed all the information about their narrative campaigns and also deleted the client list they had available. Everything just says to contact them for more info, which is definitely strange.
But despite Chaotic Good's cover-up efforts, the cat was out of the bag and a bunch of people began to write about this. Eventually, a Wired article dropped, which made the murmurs transition into official headlines and a growing problem for Chaotic Good and its artists. Basically, everyone was feeling like a lot of their big favorite artists were psyops, which is definitely not a good look. And like I said, Geese is just a recent example, but that list had artists like MKG or MKG. Still not sure how to say it. Okay Lu, Dijon, Netspeed, Alden, Snow Strippers, Jane Remover, and more. Many of these artists I named specifically I've seen a lot of buzz or discourse or general conversation around.
Also, you may notice the guy who posted this picture of the list included a price sheet, which says like 15K per 300 post kickoff across our internal account network, with that being their highest price package, which is really interesting. I don't know if that's legit though. And I'm not going to dive deep into every single artist for this video, but Hollis Tiffany and Mumford & Sons were pretty interesting to me. With the story going so viral, fans began realizing that there was some new deep level marketing being used in the music industry. And if we're being realistic, it's probably being used in every industry. And this doesn't mean that the artists or products being pushed by these campaigns aren't inherently bad. It just proves that their methods of getting big, which to be fair probably wasn't even their direct decision, is a little bit deceitful.
But Chaotic Good is far from the only company doing this, and artists like Drake, Baby No Money, Black Sabbath, and more have all been utilizing some form of short-form clipping campaign. And while Chaotic Good may be doing some really weird stuff with their fan page and narrative campaigns, they're all in the same vein as the general clip campaign that a lot of people in the music industry are using. For example, Baby No Money did a PR stunt where he said he was quitting music and then like a month later came back with the song Diamonds Are Forever, which was posted by a ton of TikTok pages. I think this is pretty obvious when you scroll through the sound that a lot of these posts about him being back are very formulaic and clearly coordinated. And his manager flat out admitted that they ran a clip campaign. His manager said, "I don't know anybody not utilizing clipping who's actually competitive in the marketplace." The instructions for Baby No Money's campaign are as follows: Memes are not allowed, must take Baby No Money in the caption, on-screen text that covers at least a third of the screen.
A major place these clip campaigns take place is on a platform called Woop, where Mumford & Sons, Harry Styles, Brandi Carlile, and many more have had clipping campaigns. Woop CEO said, "I remember seeing Drake on the platform, Lil Tecca on the platform. It's probably the most effective way to explode your upcoming album because what are the alternatives? You can get a billboard or you can post yourself and do a couple sponsored posts, but then you get lost in the algorithms almost immediately. So, the only way to persist the relevancy is by having an army of thousands and thousands of people." Peter Thiel is also an investor in Woop, so it's all connected somehow.
There's also other agencies, too, though, like Clipping Culture that's worked with Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, and the Rolling Stones. Clipping as a marketing strategy itself is also not regulated by the FTC since it isn't technically a paid partnership, or at least it's not treated as such yet. So, it looks much more organic. It looks like a fan who's just posting a clip, but in reality, it isn't. It's paid. A good way that sums up the clipping economy is as the Woop CEO said, "I view clipping as act one of what this new internet economy looks like, where you have all these people doing micro jobs for cash and being part of a bigger movement in business."
But, what even is clipping? How does it work? And surely it's not something that's only in the music industry. Well, this actually happens across the entire entertainment industry and was most likely born from streaming. I found a very good article from Leo Marroquin that said, "Content clipping is cutting short clips from longer video or audio, then distributing them across social platforms." That part is not new. What changed is that it has become industrialized. There are now companies, platforms, and freelance networks that exist specifically to do this at scale on behalf of brands and creators paying for it.
There are plenty of examples of this in streaming, and I think the biggest example is Clavicular. As a content creator myself, I remember when Clavicular was blowing up, and I heard some people in the industry talking about him running a clip campaign, and that's when I was first made aware of this strategy. And it's especially interesting because in the recent months he's been amassing billions of views across multiple platforms, and that's not just from his personal accounts. That's where the horde of freelance clippers come into play. In March of 2026, Clav's clips got over 2.2 billion views from 69,000 videos posted by an army of 1,600 clippers. But Clavicular himself is not the one organizing it, because he's not the marketing genius. There's actually an organization or marketing firm, similar but not the same to Chaotic Good, known as Clipping. Ironically, they also chose to keep the playbook open to the world, sort of, as they have released the numbers themselves. And on top of that, they're even dropping TikTok edit type trailers for their platform.
The organization started by 23-year-old Anthony Fujiwara has been killing it and expanding in many ways. Anthony started out at 16 with a cracked version of Premiere where he would clip together things like Fortnite compilations. Then when he realized gameplay wasn't enough to hold attention, he ventured on into the world of content. Ironically, he reached out to me in like 2024 about doing a clip campaign. He didn't call it that back then. I don't think that was a thing yet. But I personally wasn't really interested in TikTok or Instagram Reels or anything like that, so I like the longer videos. Regardless though, since I've talked to him, he's clearly been crushing it. I had no idea he was behind this company, and there's not much competition in the way of clipping.exe. Clipping clips podcasts, Netflix specials, is partnered with a variety of some of the biggest streamers, and has had deals with major brands like DoorDash.
But this obviously wasn't just a method used on Clavicular. All of the top streamers get billions of views doing it. And to understand how they do it, I'm going to break the model down with some of the biggest streamers. First is one who's kind of been blowing up all of a sudden, and that's Nina Drama. Ever since the UFC embraced her, she's seemingly blown up onto the scene. Before her massive internet appearance, Nina worked as a model, but once she shifted into the MMA content, her views skyrocketed. You've probably seen clips of her collaborating with some of the biggest fighters and streamers over the past few months and years, but none of this is by accident. It was all by design to create as many clippable moments as possible. In March, to my surprise, she's ranked number two behind Clavin views with 882 million views, 22,000 clips, and 932 clippers. After her came Jumpsuit Skin with 812 million views, 30,000 clips, and 787 clippers. Then you have Aiden Ross in fourth, and Neon close behind him. Both of which with views in the hundreds of millions, clips in the tens of thousands, and clippers in the high hundreds.
So, as you can see, this is quite the massive effort. It's no longer the YouTuber that has a second channel with clips that his editor runs. It's a full-scale economy, and that economy has employers, employees, and massive systems in place. A popular model many of these clippers go through is on Discord servers, many of which are directly organized by clipping. Almost every campaign starts out with one creator, brand, or something of the sort to focus on. For example, they don't just push clips for streamers. Sometimes they'll run campaigns for clippers to use specific songs from an artist like Ice Spice's Thotty, which must not be working out too well cuz I've never heard that song, or Destroy Lonely's song Jumanji, or Lil Yachty's Concrete Boys Collective. They've also run campaigns with people like Shaq and Blueface, both of which I see often on TikTok or Reels.
Once the focus is selected, then comes the content flood on a variety of platforms depending on specific goals of the campaign. Typically, the content is a 15- to 30-second clip cut from the original stream, podcast, or whatever else it may be. The key to this is that the clippers selects the clip that they find interesting and think has viral potential because you get paid based on how many views you get. So, all sorts of clips are being posted constantly, and that's why you'll often see the same clips over and over again cuz they're proven to work and go viral, so other clippers will just be like, "Oh, I'll just repost the same one. It seems to work."
Then, there's different ways they get paid. Sometimes they get a CPM deal. So, for every thousand views you get on a clip, you may get a few bucks on the high end. And with a viral clip, that could be a lot of money. Sometimes they'll pay you a flat rate per views or clips posted. Sometimes you don't get paid, but you can keep the revenue from the clips if you get monetized. Or sometimes it's all the above. Sometimes it's none of the above. There are all sorts of ways to incentivize people to clip, as I'm sure you guys can imagine and as you probably saw on screen. And many of these postings also come with required view floors to get paid out. So, overall, these programs tend to be very well put together by a highly skilled team.
Clipping isn't the only group that does this, but they're the only one that does it at such a proficient scale and high level. A lot of times creators will individually set up their own clip campaigns, whether or not they know it. I've seen Tommy G, Brandon Buckingham, Good Griefs, the funny Tik Tok guy, and other YouTubers doing it as well. And I'm not saying they're bad for doing it, either. I just think it gets a little more corporate and commoditized when companies like Clipping get involved. That starts to make things feel very inorganic.
What makes this especially unique is that often times a lot of these clippers are coming from traditionally poorer countries, and that's not by accident, either. As just like with manufacturing, clipping targets people from parts of the world so that they can pay lower rates. Anyway, a YouTuber named Devin Nash did a deep investigation into Clipping and their campaigns, and he revealed there was a lot of money involved in this. "Where even like in a a crazy number, where like 70% of the views are free, which I I I think it's probably closer to like 20% or 30%. The math on it is it would cost 666,371 dollars a month, even at 1 dollar CPM, just to run Clav's campaign alone, not even considering all these other people."
So, this means every month hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars are being spent to push these content creator campaigns. And this is just the budget for the streamers that clipping has disclosed. The entire industry is probably spending hundreds of millions if not billions. That's some pretty big marketing spend right there. Which makes you wonder, are the people themselves who are being clipped the ones paying for this? Well, Clavicular himself actually said that Kick does help him finance a lot of the campaigns. "Why do you think you're the fastest growing creator in the world right now? I think Kick has helped push me a lot with their clipping budget. So, you know, over six figures a month and and that campaign have been going towards pushing me out there to audiences because on Kick there's not really a lot of growth, right? There's not as many users that switch, so people aren't organically coming across your streams. So, they kind of have to incentivize people to stream on that platform in other ways. And one of the ways they go about it is uh with the Kick clipping program where there's like a, you know, $20 or $30 CPM um and that kind of incentivizes people."
Which would make sense since you see their logo on tons of clips. This method may cost millions of dollars, but they don't just do it cuz they love their creators. Of course, it's funneling viewers back to their platform as well. Devin Nash, the guy I mentioned earlier, got into one of these invite-only campaigns and exposed some of their instructions. "I mean, we can't possibly know what goes on there because they're invite-only and no one would ever invite me. Or would they? Okay, so please use the examples below to make sure the Kick logo and watermark placement is correct on all clips. The Kick overlay should always be clearly visible and placed so that it can be properly seen at all times. Every one of these multiple billions of views has that Kick logo square right into the right right in the bottom for the entire duration of the video and every one of the clippers is doing that." I'll make sure to link his video below if you guys are interested. It's really good.
So, like I said earlier, another major reason Kick is doing this is to not just grow their creators, but their brand as well. However, there's other ways that people finance these campaigns. With musicians it can be their record label or on a smaller scale it can just be a YouTuber paying out of pocket. These clip campaigns function very similar to the fan page campaigns we saw with Chaotic Good. That's why you'll often see a viral clip from some random account that says speed fan 5295. Regardless, the reason that every name I've probably said in this video, especially if you're younger and you doom scroll a lot, sounds familiar to you or you've seen on your feed recently, is because of clip campaigns, fan page campaigns, narrative campaigns, and everything in between.
As the Leo guy I mentioned earlier said, volume is the whole point. is to get a clip on as many feeds as possible. With thousands of clips circulating about an artist, streamer, or celebrity, one of them is bound to go viral with more to follow. The reason this is so interesting, yet feels kind of wrong to me, is because it feels very deceitful. When you're scrolling, you've learned how to identify ads, partnerships, or paid promo on your feed, but you probably aren't expecting an opinion on your favorite niche artist to be fake. You probably aren't expecting someone's background song choice in their fun little video to be fake. And you probably aren't expecting the people posting on half of your feed to be fake themselves.
The problem is that clipping, and especially the way Chaotic Good was utilizing clipping, feel very deceitful. It all feels forced and organic, especially as it has been growing as its own industry the past few years. Now, I don't personally have anything against clipping or clippers or Anthony Fuji for starting clipping.exe, but because of how fresh this is and how big it's becoming, it's a very unexpected form of marketing that's a little hard to pick up on sometimes, and can leave you feeling a little uneasy. It just makes everything feel a lot less organic.
Objectively with the amount of volume that these big streamers, musicians, and celebrities are able to put out thanks to how much money they already make, it makes it all that much more difficult for other regular degular people to compete. And I think Devin Nash put it well when he said, "You have 70,000 clips, you go anywhere you want. It's just not going to make a difference what your content is. It kind of fundamentally undermines like the whole purpose of like what content creation was kind of is. Like content creation was kind of a voting system. It was kind of like, 'Oh, like we think this guy like Mark Rober is interesting. So, we're going to like watch his video.' And then that video And then everyone's like, 'Yay, that video is going to do well.' And then Mark Rober was like, 'Wow, I got rewarded for that. I'll make more videos.' And like so the cycle goes. But now, the algorithm will just pick up anybody, no matter how uninteresting or how boring at this volume. And it's just going to push it no matter what because it's taught that the sheer volume of posts about the same thing equals that that's important."
This is where we get into kind of the the dark side of the issue. What you are not even choosing the content that you you watch anymore. The algorithm by volume and these paid clipping campaigns are quite literally choosing it for you. I think you can sort of control your algorithm to a degree. But for the most part, I agree with Devin in the fact that due to sheer volume, the people paying the most clippers or fan page campaigners will inevitably pop up on your feed.
The problem with this is that this feels like something you'd expect like the US government to do. Like I'm already assuming that a lot of political accounts I see are fake and they're just spreading propaganda or whatever. Like during the peak of COVID, the US military launched a psyop aimed at discrediting China's Sinovac vaccine in countries like the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Philippines. An investigation by Reuters confirmed that they used hundreds of fake social media accounts to plant rumors that Chinese vaccines were inferior or contained pork gelatin. The Pentagon actually acknowledged this and shut down the program following the investigation. Or in 2005, there was the Devil Eyes project that was used to undermine Osama bin Laden's influence among youth in the Middle East. In this one, the CIA got a guy who made GI Joe action figures to make action figures of bin Laden with a face that would dissolve in heat. And when the outer layer melted, it revealed a scary red-faced demon with green eyes. The CIA confirmed the existence of these prototypes after the project was scrapped.
These are the crazy weird things I expect to get syopped by. Not baby no money marketing campaigns or discussions on how good Two Hollis is. So, the whole reason I'm making this video is because I have noticed this trend lately a lot in my feed. And it's just really interesting to me how strange and somewhat corporate the internet has become. In one way, it's kind of interesting to see how things have evolved, but on the other hand, the much bigger hand, it just feels off and it's a little disappointing. In large part, this works because of how algorithms have been optimized to oblivion and how the internet as a whole has honestly been getting worse. So, if you're interested in how we got the current internet we're dealing with, make sure to click the video that's on screen right now.