In his new movie “The YouTube Effect,” Alex Winter (“Zappa”) probably won't surprise many with his claim that, with the invention of YouTube, society has indeed changed. By anyone's measure, it's been a tumultuous couple of decades: lots of social upheaval, shifting media paradigms, accumulation of misinformation.
Fortunately, Winter doesn't stop there. “The YouTube Effect” may be a catalog of very recent history, but it does the valuable job of connecting the many seemingly random dots into a clear narrative picture. What started, oddly enough, as an idea for a knockoff video version of the sleazy "Hot or Not" website, where people could share clips and the audience could provide binary feedback shot up a lot. quickly into a billion dollar company bought by Google.
Director: Alex Winter
Writer: Alex Winter
Stars: Caleb Cain, Steve Chen, Hany Farid
It's almost quaint to see headlines from 15 years ago declaring that Google's purchase of YouTube was a financial mistake of epic proportions. It also seems almost innocuous to watch Google decide to monetize the video platform, since they are, after all, in the business of making money, and in the process send all of society as we know it on the express elevator to hell.
“The YouTube Effect” spends a bit of time on the naive initial promise of crafty creators making hilarious videos and sharing them with the world, achieving surprising stardom based on grit, personality, and a halfway decent internet connection. But once the algorithm kicks in, it's another story. With YouTube creators now financially incentivized to get clicks regardless of the quality or respectability of their content, the floodgates have opened for rude, cruel and irresponsible content. (Winter's documentary claims that 10% of the seemingly countless videos on YouTube are conspiracy theories, and if you've ever visited the site yourself, you'd probably think that number seems low.)
Winter's film rarely comes out and says it, but "The YouTube Effect" is, more than anything, an examination of the dangers of unchecked capitalism. For every positive aspect of the platform, such as a section dedicated to harmless children's cartoons for the whole family, there is a greedy and petty perversion that is ruining it for everyone. Those cute cartoons were quickly parodied into abusive and sexist animated clips that were, thanks to Google's algorithm, which prioritizes content that appeals regardless of whether you really wanted to watch it, recommended to kids along with real, caring treatment.
It's frustrating to see YouTube's positive outcomes like queer representation, Black Lives Matter rallies, and the undermining of propaganda state media being mentioned, then quickly pushed aside as disasters (apparently) demand more outreach. Caleb Cain of "Faraday Speaks" describes in detail how a search for mental health videos quickly turns into an alt-right rabbit hole, targeting people seeking solace with videos who, like fictional cult leader Tyler Durden in "Fight Club", they seek to manipulate the vulnerable by giving them power fantasies and scapegoating.
Between the far right, videos of murders that cannot be removed despite protests by victims' families, online abuse and doxing by the GamerGate movement, and the "disinformation apocalypse" that transformed the COVID pandemic from a national crisis. In a pervasive attack on our shared sense of reality, Winter's documentary may find little time to talk about issues that, in a saner world, would have been more than enough to justify the creation of "The YouTube Effect." Occupy Wall Street is a blip on Winter's radar. QAnon is represented by a single interview with a subject whose account is largely secondhand, as it details the nightmare of watching his mother, who unsurprisingly is not interviewed, descend into an almost religious fervor of the end. of the world.
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