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I discovered Lindsay Ellis a few months ago as this person who does deep-dive video essays on nerdy subjects in a way that isn’t shite and have been hooked ever since. Despite never really being a big follower of deep-dive video essays I now only ever watch cleverly edited straight-to-camera rapid-fire talkings about some minutiae or other by people much younger than me.
Because Lindsay’s style of work is new to me I’ve of course got like 2,000 words in the drafts folder about it, which I will eventually edit down to something succinct like “I like her work because she uses her brain to think about stuff while crafting these wonderfully entertaining packages that remind me of zines in the 1990s”. But that’s for another day.
This video in particular is a bit of a departure because it’s about YouTube itself, the platform on which she and many others present and distribute their work. It’s mostly about the desire for and value given to “authenticity”, which has been around long before YouTube and will be with us long after but which remains fascinating for how impossible it is to define (given our inner selves are often a mystery to us, can we ever truly be authentic?) and for how we feel we know it when we can’t see it.
More pertinently, the combination of YouTube’s culture of authenticity-expectation and it’s aggressively tuned algorithms, does not appear to be providing video producers with a safe working environment, mentally speaking.
In June Polygon published YouTube’s top creators are burning out and breaking down en mass and this week The Guardian released The YouTube stars heading for burnout: ‘The most fun job imaginable became deeply bleak’.
James Bridle calls this algorithmic employment:
[Algorithmic employment] has two main qualities: optimisation and opacity. “Optimisation” - from the employer’s point of view of course - really means the extraction of every possible effort, with no regard to the cost (there are always others to exploit).
But the process is always opaque - and thus confusing, anxiety-inducing, to the employee… selective opacity is a form of power, a deeply oppressive one…
That’s combined, too, with the illusion of choice, whether it’s YouTubers or Uber drivers, or the supposed flexibility of zero-hours contracts. The outsourcing of responsibility. Google, YouTube, and others continue to engineer and implement dystopia for our benefit, if we choose to see it.
What makes the YouTube algoployees different to, say, Deliveroo biker could be the emotional labour required to manufacture the correct levels of authenticity, and to deal with the fallout of that when it lands in places you weren’t expecting.
I discovered this evening that comments on YouTube count as an engagement metric, so videos that have lots of comments get pushed up the sidebar by the algorithm. Added to this, users of YouTube expect to be able to leave comments and if they don’t, they get mad.
I feel like I’ve discovered a new seam of really interesting activity on the internet and it’s all great and awesome, but I’m simultaneously worried about the mental health of these people, and that’s not nice. I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect it might involve moving off YouTube, if that’s even possible.
Pete’s favourite YouTube accounts of the moment:
Is it wrong that even after all this I’m finding myself thinking seriously about starting a YouTube channel thingy? Something like Pete in the shed with the rabbits. I dunno.
