Education Quote by Joey Skaggs

There is a clean, almost cheerful ruthlessness in Skaggs's phrasing: "complex ways" frames deception as craft, not sin, while "manipulate the manipulators" flips the moral polarity. The line doesn’t apologize for gamesmanship; it upgrades it. He’s describing a tactical evolution, like learning a new instrument, except the instrument is media attention and the audience is a press ecosystem hungry for spectacle.

Skaggs is speaking from the tradition of the hoax as critique: the stunt that exposes how easily institutions launder nonsense into news. The intent is twofold. First, to bait gatekeepers into revealing their incentives - speed over verification, virality over truth. Second, to commandeer that same incentive structure for causes he claims are substantive. The word "passionate" matters because it positions his actions as activism rather than pranksterism, a self-issued ethical permit.

The subtext is less flattering: he’s admitting that manipulation is the common currency, not an aberration. Media "manipulators" - producers, editors, publicists - are already shaping narratives; Skaggs just insists on doing it louder and with a trapdoor. It’s also a confession of escalation. Once you know the system can be gamed, you start optimizing the game, and each "complex" iteration risks becoming indistinguishable from the very attention economy you’re trying to indict.

Culturally, this reads like an early draft of our current age: outrage as distribution strategy, irony as camouflage, moral messaging delivered through engineered gullibility. Skaggs isn’t outside the machine; he’s operating it with gloves off.