Entering ChinaThe magical realism of the live broadcast has added a new twist – those top anchors who cried when the house collapsed are returning to the battlefield in a more absurd way than the resurrection scene of “The Legend of Zhen Huan”. Some people wear carp heads and cos dead fish that are not afraid of boiling water, and some people pretend to be the Lion King to play a mime, and they are alive and well in a “guess who I am” metaverse show. In this year, the standard action of the anchor after the collapse of the house is no longer to apologize and withdraw from the network, but to wholesale Yiwu hoods overnight, after all, in the traffic field, the highest level of “shameless” is “change your face”.
Brother Yang’s matrix trumpet can be called contemporary Internet performance art: the big one pretends to be dead, and the small one jumps. Five months ago, because of the lesson of the mooncake overturn, they were not taught to “eat without speaking”, but they were taught to “broadcast without speaking” – the two mascots in the live broadcast room performed pantomime throughout the whole process, and the gestures of the comparison were like asking: “Old iron, brush up on electronic merits?” If you want to talk about the wisdom of contemporary Internet survival, you have to look at these anchors, who are well versed in the truth that “the Internet has no memory, only algorithms”, and regards the collapse of the house as a vacation, and the comeback as a resumption of work, which perfectly interprets what it means to “as long as I am not embarrassed, the embarrassing thing is a leek”.
The underlying logic of this resurrection tournament is comparable to quantum mechanics: the streamers firmly believe that the collapsed house will form a “reverse black hole”, and the darker it is, the more it can absorb traffic. They are very similar to the players in the game who buy resurrection armor with kryptonite, but instead of real money, they use the audience’s memory eraser. When “sincere apology” turns into “strategic stealth”, and “painful reform” turns into “fancy testing the waters”, the live broadcast industry has evolved into “Schrödinger’s Shura field” – you never know if it’s a repentant anchor on the other side of the screen, or an AI-generated digital stand-in.
The essence of the “head cover tactics” and “vest rebirth” of the head anchor is the systematic harvesting of consumer trust by the platform, capital and anchors. When Zhang Lan made a comeback with the character of “elegant and independent woman” on the video account, she deliberately covered up her history of using family conflicts and vulgar marketing to harvest traffic, and this kind of “personality bleaching” exposed the unspoken rules of the industry: trust is not rebuilt, but reset through algorithms.
Behind this calculation is the “credit black market” acquiesced by the platform: the anchor uses the vest account to reset the moral stain, and the platform secretly supports it through the traffic distribution mechanism, and finally forms a closed-loop industrial chain of “collapsed houses, skin change, harvesting”, and consumers become hostages of algorithms.
The “containment strategy” of the video account for the bad anchors reveals the ethical disorder in the platform competition. Although Douyin and Kuaishou have banned anchors such as Zhang Lan and Brother Xiaoyang, the video account has provided a “hotbed of resurrection” for these people. The data shows that in 2023, the GMV of Channels e-commerce will be less than one-tenth of Douyin’s, and it is eager to increase the data by introducing controversial anchors.
The essence of this kind of “platform collusion” is to quench thirst under traffic hunger. For example, after Ni Haishan and other anchors were banned by Douyin for false publicity, they rebuilt the traffic pool on the video account, but the platform did not retrospectively review their historical behavior. When regulation becomes a selective tool, the “social responsibility” of the platform becomes an ornament of the commercial game.
The deeper crisis lies in the erosion of values. When Zhang Lan tied the “independent woman” character with the sales of hot and sour noodles in the live broadcast room, and when Brother Xiao Yang used the mentorship system to build a personality cult-style traffic empire, what they sold was not only a commodity, but also a survival philosophy of “success can be unscrupulous”. The infiltration of such values into young people through algorithms may lead to a deeper crisis of social trust.
The farce of collective resurrection is more like a large-scale social experiment: testing the memory duration of Internet goldfish and measuring the elastic limit of business ethics. The real vitality of business is always built on a sustainable trust contract. Instead of delving into the “resurrection armor”, the anchors should reconstruct the “value armor” – after all, in addition to the algorithm, there is the ultimate firewall of the human heart.
