The Death of YouTube

By Alexander Blum

It is no secret that traditional media sources such as The Wall Street Journal have long been at odds with the successful independent media hosted on YouTube. Independent media, which allows content creators to receive money based on the performance of their videos, any video, on any subject, is a threat to the stranglehold of conformity and safe opinion one sees on the pages of The New York Times, where conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch is given column space to argue that financial ties to Russia are evidence of a Putin-led conspiracy, and philosopher Peter Singer is allowed to argue in favor of the rape of disabled people .

Traditional media, of course, failed spectacularly in the 2016 election. Each new piece condemning Donald Trump , in truth, only propelled him, because it was hatred toward the modern society, and its fifth pillar, which fueled Trump's rise in the first place. When the media takes the angle of moralizing and scolding, they place themselves as tyrannical father and tyrannical mother at once, and become symbols of everything that cultural rot truly is.

It is no surprise, then, that the alt-right flourished on independent media, and that their favored candidate won, despite all the Ivy League horses and men on Heaven and Earth arrayed against him. Content creators on all sides of the political aisle have flourished on YouTube, creating an ideological voice for those rejected by traditional media, such as Paul Joseph Watson, Sargon of Akkad, and numerous other right-wing populists.

Look to the recent PewDiePie scandal for the canary in the coal mine of YouTube's demise. PewDiePie, a children's videogame channel devoted to Let's Plays and sophomoric humor, was denounced by the Wall Street Journal as a Nazi propagandist, for a video containing a Holocaust joke , in which the only way to 'get' the joke is to find the Holocaust appalling, and to see dark comedy in the casual way in which the phrase "Kill all Jews" is raised up, written on cardboard by a shirtless Indian man who was paid $5 to do so. It is tasteless, vulgar, sure. But only the most sublime sub-strata of idiot could possibly take the joke as praise of Nazism, or sympathy to Nazi ideology.

It is of little consequence to him, as he is already immeasurably rich from using YouTube, but this smear campaign is a testament to the ease at which idiotic narratives can appear and spread unchallenged by official news sources, to attack independent media and know that the defenses rallied will also come from independent content creators , never fellow traditional media publications , who will always take the side of their colleagues.

The sadness in PewDiePie's smearing is the mediocrity of his content, of course. If someone so popular and so apolitical can be considered a Nazi sympathizer on the basis of a joke, who else can be destroyed without context by mediocre bespectacled boors in major newsrooms?

Enter the current state of YouTube. In response to ads appearing on hateful content, less than 0.001 percent of all monetized YouTube videos , a new algorithm has been introduced that denies advertising revenue to any video that traffics in a subject deemed controversial. That means, religion, politics, and virtually all content that actually holds meaning in public discourse.

I can already hear the decadent liberal reply - "Good. Cut off ad revenue for the alt-right and the anti-immigration hatemongers. Who cares?"

The demonetization of controversial content has also impacted channels that produce democratic socialist and LGBTQ content. As it turns out, supporting censorship as a value in any form soon becomes a beast that turns on its master. Those who seek a scrubbed clean, algorithm-policed online dystopia will also wash away numerous gems they did not expect to be found 'controversial' by the censors. But having given the censors power, the beauty is wiped away anyway, at the cost of fighting a bigotry that has only swelled and exploded worldwide despite all attempts to censor or finger-waggle it away.

Traditional media, and conformist advertisers, would certainly love to see a YouTube bleached beautiful, made politically correct and removed of ambiguity. But they only corral opinion into their mediocre mangers, further enrage those on the fringes of discourse, and alienate those seeking to make their viewpoints heard, those independent creators who seek to earn a living by making religious or political content for YouTube.

After all, the open web is, most of all, an opportunity for independent thinkers to communicate with audiences that have sought opinion outside of the mainstream. The attack on independent YouTube creators income is an attack on a new realm of online discourse, and if it continues to expand, the first threads of an obvious net of online censorship being built before our eyes.

Increasingly, punditry and journalism are made elitist professions, walled off from ordinary people behind years and years of unpaid work. YouTube provided a meritocratic response - if there is an audience, there is pay. Watching that solution fall apart seems to expose only the inherent flaws of traditional media, and I hope that new platforms emerge that do not shy away from controversy, as a world without controversy is a false Heaven without genuine thought, suspended artificially above a world that will only move in wrath against a paradise made to exclude ideas that threaten its falsely-pure walls.

More of Alexander Blum's essays and fiction can be found here.