Present.Perfect. review – China’s livestreamers looking for love
This eerie documentary dives deep into the hundreds of millions of online attention-seekers desperate to make contact via tales of the bizarre and mundane
Shengzhe Zhu’s interesting and at times eerie documentary is an edited curation of hundreds of hours of live-stream videos in China. People (or “anchors”) broadcast themselves doing interesting or mundane or bizarre things and sometimes achieve massive followings. Their audiences interact with the livestreamers in real time with comments and requests and donations of virtual gift icons that can be redeemed for cash.
This is a social-media attention economy in action, and in recent years it’s grown to be an extraordinary phenomenon in China, with more than 400 million livestreamers in 2017, before the government started cracking down, ostensibly because of a tragic accident in which someone fell to his death while attempting to live video himself doing pull-ups from the edge of a skyscraper.