Article|Archive
As a form, the YouTube video essay is entirely at odds with how we’re told we should receive our media — in five second Idiocracy doses. Yet for perhaps five years, this brand of often half-hour-long philosophical treatise was not only everywhere, but was vaguely hip. For something chiefly made by one-man bands and bedroom hacks, it was actually an excellent approximation of the liberal ideal of “debate in the public square”.
It was, in short, a digital gang of Thomas Paines, all trying to bring their ideas to a new generation. Then, just as suddenly, the biggest video hosting platform in the world tweaked a couple of lines in its algorithm, and the video essay era ended. At the 20th anniversary of YouTube, it is important to remember this brief Prague Spring of a more thoughtful internet — and to recall quite how much influence it had on the internet we’ve ended up with.
By 2018, when I made a radio documentary about the YouTube online Right, I’d become fascinated by the form. To me, it seemed like something totally new. A world of genuine outsiders, people who would otherwise have had no standing in conventional journalism, they performed the kind of dense argumentation that workaday journalists neither had the bandwidth nor, often, the brain cells for.
Central to this emergent world was the figure of Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber who went via the nomme de guerre of Sargon of Akkad, a name he’d pulled from an ancient Mesopotamian king. Benjamin had no bona fides. A university drop out, he’d briefly had a job sweating data at the Swindon Research Council. Somewhere along the way, he’d become radicalised against what were then called “Social Justice Warriors” — it would be another four years before anyone called them woke.
Railing against the perversion of his beloved video games by diversity ideology, Benjamin uploaded essays that used the core of Western philosophy to justify his positions and vanquish his enemies. Chief among them was Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist who typified the mould then emerging: recently graduated upper-middle-class girls obsessed with tokenistic representation, intersectionality and victimology. Benjamin saw the tide of evil rolling in.
Like a sucker, Benjamin actually went back to the core texts of Western thought, arguing from first principles. For fans of their idol’s lugubrious baritone, there was a kind of shock in being asked to defend things that, until yesterday, had barely needed considering. Merit is good. Free speech is inalienable. Incomers to a society should contribute. But the arguments were dredged up, from Aristotle’s ideas on “the good” to Voltaire on the separation of powers. A particular totem of the day was to believe in On Liberty, as though Mill were the final word on everything. Even Milo Yiannopoulos, that charlatan’s charlatan, would bang on about having a copy by his bedside.
Later, Benjamin turned to analysing power itself. He published video essays on Machiavelli. He became obsessed with reverse-engineering the work of Saul Alinsky, the Marxist theorist who wrote Rules for Radicals, the Leftist agitator’s bible. Others joined the party, with their own beats and their own pseudonyms. The Godless Spellchecker spun out of the post-Dawkins militant atheist wave. The Academic Agent, for his part, was a moonlighting university lecturer, initially a lover of Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics, but who gradually turned away from libertarianism and towards hardcore neo-reaction.
At the time, with Obama in the White House and Osbornism ascendent, the Right was in disgustingly flabby shape. In the mainstream press, certainly, the Sebastian Payne tendency was all you got: the Right as the Left driving at the speed limit. But on YouTube, at least, a fightback had begun in earnest. “We can’t wait on anyone to do this for us,” Benjamin told a 2017 live stream. There was no world beyond.
“But on YouTube, at least, a fightback had begun in earnest.”
Nor was the Right alone: the Left were busy developing its own essayists too. Collectively known as BreadTube, they pioneered a tactic called “algorithmic hijacking”. Piggybacking on keywords popular with their Right-wing opponents, they ensured their response videos ranked high in searches. Top of the heap was the genuinely entertaining Natalie Wynn. Known to fans as ContraPoints, Wynn mixed film criticism with Leftist ideology in a similar style to the cult theorist Mark Fisher. Across the Atlantic, there were the likes of Hbomberguy, the pseudonym of Harry Brewise, who amassed 1.7 million subscribers with videos like “Climate Denial: A Measured Response”.
When it came, the end was sudden. It happened around 2019, when YouTube switched up its algorithm. To boost overall watch-time, admins chose to prioritise videos that were far longer, looser confections. Suddenly, the two-hour livestream was at the top of everyone’s feed, fatal for 20-minute video essays that could take days to script and edit. And, with that, creators who had been stars of the previous era began to melt away. Their view counts ticked down, the gaps between videos grew longer. Most either stopped or adopted the new mode.
In many ways, though, this shift was helpful to the burgeoning online Right. Less reliant on the auteur, they could instead lean on celebrity guests culled from other YouTube channels. No longer operating in their own silos, they effectively became a cast, a menagerie of personalities who visited each other’s home bases for cosy chats.
Benjamin leaned into the trend effectively. Exhausted by his own content production cycle, he decided to clone himself. Farming out his schtick to a new generation of twenty-somethings in blazers, he launched an expanded daily show that he called The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. It chiefly consisted of Benjamin and his mini-mes reacting to stories they read out from the mainstream press.
The end of the video essay also meant the start of an era in which the algorithm prioritised the livestream, and the long, rambling, podcast style chat. In a certain sense, that was a good next step for Benjamin and the other past masters of the form. Constantly going on each other’s shows meant that norms began to establish themselves, as these thought leaders moved from one stream to the next. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Carl Schmitt. Suddenly, it was taken as ancient wisdom that “he who decides the exception is sovereign”.
In the scheme of things, the video essay era was a brief ellipsis. Yet it was deeply consequential, and not just in terms of Carl Benjamin’s career. For a start, there was the generational cohort effect: the 24 year olds of today would have been 15 back then. They grew up in the world of the YouTube essay. For them, indeed, it wasn’t just fashion, it was formative. And when you hear the head-banging tone of the Zoomer crew now coming through, what you are witnessing are people who have imbibed Benjamin’s whole moral style. They come pre-loaded with the facts and arguments of the video essay era. Does migration drive growth? No. Does multiculturalism need more time to succeed? No. For them, these are settled questions.
Not that we ever quite got a breakout YouTube superstar. No technology has supplanted its elements. Far from becoming integrated into TV-land, a curious cordon sanitaire endures between broadcast media and YouTube. Yet the fruits are everywhere: just look at Trumpism in its second term. At the core of what has been happening with USAID and executive orders is precisely the kind of first-principles analysis of power that the first term lacked.
It has allowed the new government to get in at the roots of American bureaucracy, cutting off the enemy’s supply lines. Today, it’s the idea on everyone’s lips, not because it is exhausted, but because the whip hand is about to pass over: power is finally with this new revanchist Right.
Much like Mao’s Long March, the fight at first seemed unwinnable, until, gradually, the insurgents gained strength, their ideas coalescing into a creed, an ideology, with world-shaping power. Certainly, Benjamin himself seems to view his political journey in just these terms. With the USAID revelations of subsidy for Leftist causes, Benjamin pulled up an alleged payment credit to a feminist game development company called Feminist Frequency. Who was the CEO of this firm? None other than Anita Sarkeesian, the target of the YouTuber all those years ago. Beneath the receipts, Benjamin simply tweets: “I just wanted to play video games.”
Back then, terminally online nerds really did still have a live-and-let-live mentality — until politics came looking for them. At first, they thought classical liberalism would solve their problems. But the train didn’t stop there. The movement trundled on, until like The Academic Agent it became genuinely reactionary. Not merely anti-SJW, it rather assails the entire post-war consensus, from immigration to welfare to state education.The more they dug into what was wrong, with their Mill and their Aristotle, the more the YouTubers hunted for radical solutions.
Today, the online theorists are digging up the very flagstones of liberalism. They scoff at the ideal of the public square and the marketplace of ideas. They’re into the deep plumbing of power: rewarding friends and punishing enemies. We’re a long way from the golden age of “Milton Friedman DESTROYS” clips. Today, their heroes aren’t Mill and Voltaire. They’re Thomas Carlyle, Oswald Spengler and James Burnham. They really should have let him play video games.
As a form, the YouTube video essay is entirely at odds with how we’re told we should receive our media — in five second Idiocracy doses. Yet for perhaps five years, this brand of often half-hour-long philosophical treatise was not only everywhere, but was vaguely hip. For something chiefly made by one-man bands and bedroom hacks, it was actually an excellent approximation of the liberal ideal of “debate in the public square”.
It was, in short, a digital gang of Thomas Paines, all trying to bring their ideas to a new generation. Then, just as suddenly, the biggest video hosting platform in the world tweaked a couple of lines in its algorithm, and the video essay era ended. At the 20th anniversary of YouTube, it is important to remember this brief Prague Spring of a more thoughtful internet — and to recall quite how much influence it had on the internet we’ve ended up with.
By 2018, when I made a radio documentary about the YouTube online Right, I’d become fascinated by the form. To me, it seemed like something totally new. A world of genuine outsiders, people who would otherwise have had no standing in conventional journalism, they performed the kind of dense argumentation that workaday journalists neither had the bandwidth nor, often, the brain cells for.
Central to this emergent world was the figure of Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber who went via the nomme de guerre of Sargon of Akkad, a name he’d pulled from an ancient Mesopotamian king. Benjamin had no bona fides. A university drop out, he’d briefly had a job sweating data at the Swindon Research Council. Somewhere along the way, he’d become radicalised against what were then called “Social Justice Warriors” — it would be another four years before anyone called them woke.
Railing against the perversion of his beloved video games by diversity ideology, Benjamin uploaded essays that used the core of Western philosophy to justify his positions and vanquish his enemies. Chief among them was Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist who typified the mould then emerging: recently graduated upper-middle-class girls obsessed with tokenistic representation, intersectionality and victimology. Benjamin saw the tide of evil rolling in.
Like a sucker, Benjamin actually went back to the core texts of Western thought, arguing from first principles. For fans of their idol’s lugubrious baritone, there was a kind of shock in being asked to defend things that, until yesterday, had barely needed considering. Merit is good. Free speech is inalienable. Incomers to a society should contribute. But the arguments were dredged up, from Aristotle’s ideas on “the good” to Voltaire on the separation of powers. A particular totem of the day was to believe in On Liberty, as though Mill were the final word on everything. Even Milo Yiannopoulos, that charlatan’s charlatan, would bang on about having a copy by his bedside.
Later, Benjamin turned to analysing power itself. He published video essays on Machiavelli. He became obsessed with reverse-engineering the work of Saul Alinsky, the Marxist theorist who wrote Rules for Radicals, the Leftist agitator’s bible. Others joined the party, with their own beats and their own pseudonyms. The Godless Spellchecker spun out of the post-Dawkins militant atheist wave. The Academic Agent, for his part, was a moonlighting university lecturer, initially a lover of Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics, but who gradually turned away from libertarianism and towards hardcore neo-reaction.
At the time, with Obama in the White House and Osbornism ascendent, the Right was in disgustingly flabby shape. In the mainstream press, certainly, the Sebastian Payne tendency was all you got: the Right as the Left driving at the speed limit. But on YouTube, at least, a fightback had begun in earnest. “We can’t wait on anyone to do this for us,” Benjamin told a 2017 live stream. There was no world beyond.
“But on YouTube, at least, a fightback had begun in earnest.”
Nor was the Right alone: the Left were busy developing its own essayists too. Collectively known as BreadTube, they pioneered a tactic called “algorithmic hijacking”. Piggybacking on keywords popular with their Right-wing opponents, they ensured their response videos ranked high in searches. Top of the heap was the genuinely entertaining Natalie Wynn. Known to fans as ContraPoints, Wynn mixed film criticism with Leftist ideology in a similar style to the cult theorist Mark Fisher. Across the Atlantic, there were the likes of Hbomberguy, the pseudonym of Harry Brewise, who amassed 1.7 million subscribers with videos like “Climate Denial: A Measured Response”.
When it came, the end was sudden. It happened around 2019, when YouTube switched up its algorithm. To boost overall watch-time, admins chose to prioritise videos that were far longer, looser confections. Suddenly, the two-hour livestream was at the top of everyone’s feed, fatal for 20-minute video essays that could take days to script and edit. And, with that, creators who had been stars of the previous era began to melt away. Their view counts ticked down, the gaps between videos grew longer. Most either stopped or adopted the new mode.
In many ways, though, this shift was helpful to the burgeoning online Right. Less reliant on the auteur, they could instead lean on celebrity guests culled from other YouTube channels. No longer operating in their own silos, they effectively became a cast, a menagerie of personalities who visited each other’s home bases for cosy chats.
Benjamin leaned into the trend effectively. Exhausted by his own content production cycle, he decided to clone himself. Farming out his schtick to a new generation of twenty-somethings in blazers, he launched an expanded daily show that he called The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. It chiefly consisted of Benjamin and his mini-mes reacting to stories they read out from the mainstream press.
The end of the video essay also meant the start of an era in which the algorithm prioritised the livestream, and the long, rambling, podcast style chat. In a certain sense, that was a good next step for Benjamin and the other past masters of the form. Constantly going on each other’s shows meant that norms began to establish themselves, as these thought leaders moved from one stream to the next. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Carl Schmitt. Suddenly, it was taken as ancient wisdom that “he who decides the exception is sovereign”.
In the scheme of things, the video essay era was a brief ellipsis. Yet it was deeply consequential, and not just in terms of Carl Benjamin’s career. For a start, there was the generational cohort effect: the 24 year olds of today would have been 15 back then. They grew up in the world of the YouTube essay. For them, indeed, it wasn’t just fashion, it was formative. And when you hear the head-banging tone of the Zoomer crew now coming through, what you are witnessing are people who have imbibed Benjamin’s whole moral style. They come pre-loaded with the facts and arguments of the video essay era. Does migration drive growth? No. Does multiculturalism need more time to succeed? No. For them, these are settled questions.
Not that we ever quite got a breakout YouTube superstar. No technology has supplanted its elements. Far from becoming integrated into TV-land, a curious cordon sanitaire endures between broadcast media and YouTube. Yet the fruits are everywhere: just look at Trumpism in its second term. At the core of what has been happening with USAID and executive orders is precisely the kind of first-principles analysis of power that the first term lacked.
It has allowed the new government to get in at the roots of American bureaucracy, cutting off the enemy’s supply lines. Today, it’s the idea on everyone’s lips, not because it is exhausted, but because the whip hand is about to pass over: power is finally with this new revanchist Right.
Much like Mao’s Long March, the fight at first seemed unwinnable, until, gradually, the insurgents gained strength, their ideas coalescing into a creed, an ideology, with world-shaping power. Certainly, Benjamin himself seems to view his political journey in just these terms. With the USAID revelations of subsidy for Leftist causes, Benjamin pulled up an alleged payment credit to a feminist game development company called Feminist Frequency. Who was the CEO of this firm? None other than Anita Sarkeesian, the target of the YouTuber all those years ago. Beneath the receipts, Benjamin simply tweets: “I just wanted to play video games.”
Back then, terminally online nerds really did still have a live-and-let-live mentality — until politics came looking for them. At first, they thought classical liberalism would solve their problems. But the train didn’t stop there. The movement trundled on, until like The Academic Agent it became genuinely reactionary. Not merely anti-SJW, it rather assails the entire post-war consensus, from immigration to welfare to state education.The more they dug into what was wrong, with their Mill and their Aristotle, the more the YouTubers hunted for radical solutions.
Today, the online theorists are digging up the very flagstones of liberalism. They scoff at the ideal of the public square and the marketplace of ideas. They’re into the deep plumbing of power: rewarding friends and punishing enemies. We’re a long way from the golden age of “Milton Friedman DESTROYS” clips. Today, their heroes aren’t Mill and Voltaire. They’re Thomas Carlyle, Oswald Spengler and James Burnham. They really should have let him play video games.
