u/anonboxis

Hi, I’m applying for the Blue Book and want to declare a YouTube channel I run independently as professional experience. It’s an EU affairs channel, is in the YouTube Partner Programme and generated AdSense income for several months.

The supporting documents requirements seem a bit awkward for this kind of activity since they ask for signed and dated proof. I have official AdSense monthly earnings statements and Google payment receipts in my name, the YPP acceptance email, and YouTube Studio pages linking the channel to the same AdSense account.

Has anyone here declared YouTube/creator work or something similar as freelance/self-employed experience and actually had it validated? Were Google-generated statements and payment receipts enough, or did you provide something else? thx!

Slightly unusual question for this sub, but I think people working in the Brussels bubble are probably better placed to answer it than a generic newsletter or marketing community.

I run a free newsletter covering the upcoming Digital Fairness Act.

It started as a fairly small side project, but it has unexpectedly grown to around 1000 subscribers. From what I can tell, most readers are actual people working around the file: tech lobbyists, EU officials, lawyers, journalists, trade associations and public affairs consultants. It is still quite niche, but arguably a valuable niche.

The law has not even been proposed yet and has received relatively little mainstream coverage, so I expect readership and interest to grow considerably once the proposal comes out and formal negotiations begin.

I'm wondering whether there is a good way to monetise it without turning it into an annoying industry advert or undermining its independence.

For those working in public affairs, law firms, consultancies, trade associations or EU media, what would actually make sense here?

Paid subscriptions? Sponsorship from relevant organisations? A small jobs section? Sponsored events promotion? Paid briefings or research? Something else entirely?

I have come up with some ideas, but I don't really know how I would implement them since I'm not really in the bubble (yet). Like, do I just email random consultancies and say "Do you want to pay X for an ad in my newsletter", and if so, how much could I charge?

I am especially interested in what organisations in the Brussels bubble would realistically pay for, and how this might actually work in concrete terms. Does anyone have experience with this or have real anecdotes that might give me ideas?

I think this could make for a good documentary.

Modern society is more than ever before plagued by mental illness, isolation, and a general sense that something isn't quite right.

Two men in particular noticed this.

They both said capitalism was to blame, but they came to startlingly differing conclusions.

They were Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, and they had both belonged to the CCRU, the "Cybernetic Culture Research Institute", an intellectual collective at the university of Warwick in the 1990s, which focused on experimental cultural theory.

Their opinions differed in many ways:

Fisher said that the inevitability of Capitalism was an illusion, a falsity created by capitalism itself, which prevents us from imagining a world without it.

He also believed in the idea that one should always preserve one's empathy, despite the turbulent moral complexities of the world we live in.

Nick Land, on the other hand, had quite a different idea:

He had come to believe that humanity had been destined from the very beginning to create capitalism, the markets, and technology, and that these were but a primordial soup out of which something, much stranger and more inhuman than we'd ever imagined, would one day emerge.
Not only did he think the inevitability of Capitalism was real, he believed we should accelerate it as much as possible.

He, furthermore, believes human empathy to be a weakness, a brake for the technocapital machine.

Each of us is fighting two contrasting forces inside us:
Fisher's way: Questioning the system, "tuning in" to the world's suffering, and preserving your empathy, despite the pain.
And Land's way: Giving your self up to these forces, leaning into the chaos, shutting down your empathy, and retreating within, away from the pain.

We will also discuss how Land's dark, esoteric ideas have strongly influenced silicon valley, the tech billionaires, and the very systems we live in.

(And then you could get into Dark Enlightenment, e/Acc, Peter Thiel, and show how ridiculous and unhinged Land is, and how shocking his level of influence is despite that).

Edit: the "each of us is fighting" part is probably not something Curtis would say. He's not really one to inject his own personal view so directly into the commentary