Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
[Note: The author of this article has had some minor contact with Adam Conover due to shared membership in the WGA West.]
Former TruTV star Adam Conover hasn’t had a regular TV gig in a minute: Adam Ruins Everything went off the air back in 2019, and his Netflix follow-up, The G Word With Adam Conover, aired just six episodes back in 2022. Conover’s been continuing in the same basic mold since then, though, posting videos and podcasts in which he continues to debunk our (often fairly dangerous) assumptions about the ways the world works. He caught some heavy flack online over the last few weeks, though, after posting a video that seemed deeply out of step with his usual style: A sponsored video from cryptocurrency company World, showing off and promoting their awful new Orb camera/identity scanner/bizarre verification tool… thing. The video has since been deleted, but you can see bits and pieces of it in other videos dragging Conover for taking this gig. (Notably, this one from Rebecca Watson.)
Conover has now issued a new video apologizing for the first video, and thanking critics for yelling at him, saying he’s “humiliated” over his own decision to take World’s “easy money” in exchange for selling a chunk of his credibility. It is, if nothing else, an interesting twist on the standard internet apology video: Conover spends the first few minutes explaining that he genuinely doesn’t know why he did the video—at one point, he posits that he felt he was smarter than the Sam Altman-fronted World, and could do a video subtly mocking them while also taking their cash. (Which you can kind of see in the remaining clips of the sponcon short—there’s a lot of emphasis on the viewer making up their own minds, with the implication that anyone who looked at what World and Orb do with clear eyes will be suitably repulsed by them.) After stating that he’s decided not to take World’s money, the video then pivots, with Conover spending the bulk of its running time turning the whole thing into an Adam Ruins Everything-style attack on World and Orb.
Which, yes, sounds bad: Digging into the same MIT Technology Review that his critics used to lambast him, Conover describes many of the sketchy origins of how Orb was trained, involving villagers in small communities around the world being paid paltry sums to have their eyes scanned by the device. Conover also tears into the fact that Orb—which touts itself as a way to prove you’re human, in a very “getting paid to solve the problem you made billions of dollars creating” way—is technology with no apparent use case for human lives. (Which is why the company has to literally bribe you to let it scan you, giving users about fifty bucks in crypto, which you then have to use the World app to get access to, in exchange for a retinal scan. Would you be surprised to learn that World is already banned from operating in a ton of countries for predatory business practices?) As far as apologies go, it’s at least a drastic one: Conover pulls no punches in his attacks, even if it remains to be seen whether this open biting of the hand that briefly fed him can be an antidote for taking such a major credibility hit.
