Free Human Kindness: How ASMR Is Helping us Survive the Pandemic, Clinical Depression and America's Culture Wars (Part Three

You have referenced raising money for charity here but of course, many of the ASMR artists and community leaders also support themselves by performing these services. There’s been a big debate among fans and fan scholars around which aspects of the producer-fan relationship are exploitative and how to reconcile community building and profit-making in this regard. Given what you have said here about the strong affective bonds between performers and followers, I wonder how these issues have been dealt with in regard to ASMR. Are some practices here read as exploitative or as damaging to the kinds of social relationships you describe? We pay therapists, after all, and yet also see them as looking after the emotional needs of their patients/clients. 

It’s delicate. Right? People enjoy content as much as most things in their lives. They’d part with a lot before they gave it up, and yet they often steal it, even when they’d never walk into a store and put something in their backpack. Seemingly, it comes in part from the belief that content creation jobs are a pleasure to do, and people should be paid based on the amount of torment and boredom they endure. As an independent artist myself I generally stand one hundred percent on the side of others like me who are just trying to pay their rent and put food on their table. I don’t particularly want to hear Amazon Studios cry poor when they don’t even pay their taxes, but we’re individuals, working full time, who do pay our fair share. I have, however, felt momentarily taken aback when therapists asked me for money that I couldn’t comfortably afford. You come to them because you’re in pain. They express concern for you, but at the end they remind you that you have a transactional relationship. Sometimes a thought can pass through your mind. “If you actually cared, you wouldn’t leave me in a financially stressful situation.” And then I remind myself that they deserve to be paid. I just deserve functional insurance.

Both of these emotional dynamics can come up in ASMR.  I discovered the genre on YouTube, which is ad-supported. Sometimes a video would begin with the performer delivering a plug for a sponsor like Blue Apron or Casper Mattresses, but I was used to that from podcasts so it didn’t phase me. When I started watching Twitch, which is tip-supported, it took some getting used to because I was reminded incessantly about the money trading hands as announcements popped up on the screen. “Thanks, Aster, for the thousand bitties.” Even without doing any mental math it was hard to miss the fact that some of these artists were making multiple times as much money for a day’s work as I’d ever earned. You mustn’t compare like that. The goal is for all of us to win. Besides, streamers tend to repeat over and over, “You don’t need to give me anything. Please don’t feel like you have to. It’s not necessary. I love all of you equally.”  They rarely offer anything extra for sale, only their thanks and sometimes the opportunity to request a song or something. But people still pelt them with larger and larger amounts of money in a game of one-upmanship to be seen as their #1 fan. 

I once watched someone donate fifteen thousand dollars to a Twitch streamer (not an ASMRtist) over the course of a few weeks. I was like, “Who is this guy, a Saudi prince or something?” Even though the streamer was married, I felt safe in assuming he was in love with her and that no matter what happened it couldn’t end well. Plot twist: It ended very badly, but for a different reason than I expected. He convinced her to start a business with him. She put more than fifteen thousand dollars into it. Then he tried to vanish and actually left her in the red. It came out that he’d done this to other people as well. She hired an attorney and got her money back. Please, no one do that again.  The story I’m describing is the limit case. Even most of the artists who are making videos full time now worked in low-paying service industry jobs until very recently, and it scares them to think about ASMR falling out of vogue, or those artists getting #Cancelled and not having a normal career to fall back on.

YouTube regularly, routinely cheats artists out of their money by ‘demonetizing’ them. The artist allows ads to run at the beginning of their videos in exchange for payment, and then YouTube refuses to pay out by claiming that the videos have violated their standards and practices. Ninety percent of the time there’s absolutely nothing in the videos which would be considered inappropriate outside of, say, China, where YouTube does a lot of their business. YouTube won’t tell you how exactly a given video has violated the agreement, so one is left to conclude that it’s because the artist is large-chested or because the whole idea of whispering to the camera struck someone as sexual.  

Gibi, the most-subscribed-to English language ASMRtist on YouTube, ran into a different sand trap when she attempted to start a subscription service app called Zees. Essentially, artists would repost their YouTube videos on the app and she would ensure they got paid more fairly than they had elsewhere. She stressed over and over that the same videos would still be free on ad-supported YouTube, just as they always had been. We’d simply be giving our favorite artists an added layer of financial protection from the censorship whims and financial double dealings, and we’d be getting our usual content in a nicer format. Despite those promises fans got scared that yes, today her intentions sounded honorable, but if they supported her then soon all of this previously ‘free’ content would in fact end up behind a paywall. ASMR would end up like so many other post-capitalist institutions, out of reach for most people. I genuinely don’t think that’s what was going on, but the business was quietly discontinued.

I am especially interested in the phenomenon of gifting -- the exchange of meaningful, tangible objects between performers and fans, exchanges which might make the virtual online relationships seem more concrete and “real.” What role(s) do such gifts play in the ASMR community? 

Most artists are very selective in what personal information they share online, first and foremost their physical address, so it’s not always easy to send them physical gifts. But some have PO Boxes, either in their own town or near a family member, who will relay them things. Some of them also appear at conventions like TwitchCon and VidCon, where there may be an opportunity to hand them something. 

I have had two experiences with giving gifts and both were really satisfying. A Twitch streamer mentioned that they were spending Christmas alone and had no plans. I came across an ad on Facebook for a company that would send someone a cute stuffed animal and a card. I knew chickens were her favorite animal, so I sent one to her PO Box. It was the only present she got for Christmas last year. When she opened the box on stream and had a big reaction I felt really good. They’ve had that chicken next to them in every stream they’ve done since. Whenever I check in on her channel and she’s still got it close at hand I feel so glad I spent the money.

Another ASMRtist I follow, who is a big Legend of Zelda fan, developed a serious medical problem. For a few months they were in mind-bending pain, almost all day, every day. I ran across a luminescent Zelda health potion on eBay. I wanted it to sit on her shelf like a talisman. She had no way of receiving gifts, but I wanted her to own it, so I arranged to Venmo her the cash and have her buy the item for herself. Her condition has significantly improved. She says that when she was really in trouble it wasn’t the people she knew in real life who were there for her, it was her online community.

As we wrap this up, I want to return to where you started. Your first sentence was “ASMR is an art movement, an aesthetic, an online culture and even a philosophy.” So speak a bit more about the first part of the sentence. What does it mean to think of it as an art movement? How might you describe that aesthetic? And how does the aesthetic operate in the service of the philosophy and community aspects you have been discussing so systematically here? You’ve already told us a number of things in this regard, but I wanted to give you a chance to sum that up now that we as readers are better informed about what’s going on here.

In terms of formal aesthetics, ASMR films are usually recorded in absolute silence, making each sound deliberate and purposeful. They use soft volumes, which force us to stop moving around and really listen. There may be a single actor or a small few, and the actors get very intimate with the camera. The films are typically made on a low budget, by a relative amateur. The settings are usually domestic or pastoral, and instead of a house where everyone is rushing to get out the door in the morning, you’re likely to see a lot of bedrooms at 3am. The plots are often loosely-structured and more concerned with the journey than the destination. And the visuals often include a lot of close-up shots of props, costumes and other details. ASMR videos are obsessed with aesthetics like clean simplicity, color matching, beautiful tailoring and craftsmanship, and yes, potentially a person’s physical appearance – not just their genes but their clothes, their grooming. It’s all of a piece. Tonally, the films might be comedic, or contemplative, or romantic, but the mood is almost always light. And the function is to relax and uplift you, making you feel better about the world and each other.

However, neither A Quiet Place nor The Lion King is an ASMR movie. A Quiet Place possesses all of the formal aesthetics I just described, but the exact opposite tone and function. It tries to make you nervous. The Lion King possesses the tone and function I described, but virtually none of the aesthetics. ASMR, as a genre, is the meeting of a form and a function.   

Some of the most utilitarian ASMR videos are the simplest, providing white noise, rain sounds, LoFi music and other relaxing aural soundscapes which you can listen to while you write or study. My favorite mixes together rain, soft jazz and the quiet background sounds of a cafe, allowing you to trick your brain into thinking you’re writing in a public restaurant without spending money or defying COVID restrictions. Such minimalist ASMR videos might not set the world on fire with their originality and production values, but they get a lot of repeat views for obvious reasons and serve a useful purpose.  

These are just a few of the forms ASMR can take and the purposes it can serve. I hope people give it a listen.

To read the first parts of this interview, see Part One and Part Two.

Charlie Jenkins is a novelist and transmedia consultant. His upcoming debut novel, American Wrestling 1989, is a melodrama which explore cultural conflicts in the world of 1980s professional wrestling and the ways that broken and discarded people can either heal or hurt one another as they endure their own personal tragedies. He was previously the Creative Director of Chaotic Good Studios and Research Director for The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, serving clients like NBC, The CW, Blizzard Entertainment and BaseFX.