Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - YouTube's Inferno

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

YouTube insists it is not liable for the hate speech in its platform. This is also what YouTube said about the copyrighted material back when it was a start up in 2006. We revisit YouTube’s history with Chris Stokel-Walker author of the new book Youtubers. Plus your host takes responsibility! Chapter eight in the new ToE Failure miniseries.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called YouTube's Inferno. You only need to look at the fact that there are like 5,000 YouTubers plus with more than 2 million subscribers out there right now to recognize just how big a thing this is. YouTube is increasingly society. Chris Stokel Walker is a British journalist and the author of a new book called YouTubers, which might be the most enlightening thing I've read about the creators who are responsible

for making YouTube what it is today. And that new algorithm, my God. And it turns out that the YouTubers feel the same way about YouTube's algorithms as I do. It's literally, literally tearing my ass apart. I mean, their main concern is that they have absolutely no idea how it works, as nobody does.

So some people will try and guess, and that causes people to produce low quality content that kind of pollutes the whole of YouTube. We picked up some Tide Pods and we're about to become YouTube famous. It actually tastes like poison. I don't feel good. So the fact that you have to post a lot, you have to be really busy. If you're unable to produce content on less than a weekly basis, that basically means you're pretty much fucked. It's kind of what I think of as like an industrialization of YouTube going on, which is that the algorithm, as far as we know it,

promotes and prefers long videos that are posted pretty frequently. So you're talking, you know, 10, 15 minutes every other day, at least. I'm not proud of what I'm uploading on this channel, like, I'm just, I'm burnt out. And so you kind of get on a hamster wheel, which leads to a lot of the other associated issues with YouTube, which is like, creator burnout. Like, loads of creators have kind of fessed up lately to saying they're completely burnt out on this thing. And it's largely the algorithm's fault. It's a fire, bitch!

And when YouTubers get burnt out, they start burning stuff up. Eat the flame! The flame's gonna creep! Get the water! It's going down! Yo, it's going through the mattress. The mattress is actually on fire. According to Chris, the king of all fire media is a YouTuber named Jake Paul. Yo, it's getting like hot fire now. Yeah, yeah, blow it up.

Yo, blow it up. So I spent more time than is healthy watching both Logan Paul and Jake Paul videos on YouTube over the course of a few months. It changed me as a person. Why did we do that? I don't know in 2017 jake paul's neighbors they got so fed up with all the crazy fires they forced him to move out of his mansion that he was renting in beverly grove so he went out and bought a 6.9 million dollar mansion all of his own you see jake paul has figured out how to make youtube work for him. He's no slave to the algorithm.

He's a merch man. If you guys get merch in the next 72 hours, three of you are going to win a prize. The- Hey! Relax, oh my god. I'm plugging my merch! He mentions his merchandise store once every sort of 120 seconds. Just go to Fandroid.co backslash Jake Paul, enter the contest guys,

get yourself some of the hottest merch in the game. Jay's got that new merch on cuz! Also it's Jay's birthday. Fistjoy.co.uk slash jakepaul. Enter the contest, guys. Get yourself some of the hottest merch in the game. Jay's got that new merch on, cuz. Also, it's Jay's birthday. Fist bump. Ow. I know it's your birthday, but nice merch. I got him this for his birthday. You can go to fanjoy.co.uk slash jakepaul

and get your siblings, get your brother, get your sister, get your mom a birthday present. I kind of hate him for that, but also I have to weirdly admire Jake Paul because he is essentially the first postmodern YouTuber. He's very open about the fact that this is a transactional thing going on here, that he is going to try and sell you his merchandise and that's why his YouTube channel, his whole persona exists. You've got a grift for your money.

I almost friggin' died there. At least I got some merch tonight. Let's go to fanzera.co.uk slash jakepaul. The successful YouTubers are all out there selling their own merch and hawking sponsored content because they've learned that they cannot depend on YouTube for their income. The main reason why a lot of creators on YouTube use sponsored content is the unreliability of income from YouTube itself, because it's a big black box that nobody knows what it's going to be promoting or demoting tomorrow

because of the successive scandals that it goes through. Another income stream that's more dependable than YouTube's algorithm is the live show. Tour, tour, tour, tour, tour, TOUR! Or podcasts. My name is Logan Paul, controversial YouTube star, boxer, ex-vegan, and now I guess podcaster? What? Increasingly every YouTuber is diversifying into a podcast it's kind of again the likes of logan paul weirdly leading the way there so youtubers are moving to podcasting for financial stability

oh man wait till they find out that is the way to do it right you're telling me that's not that's that's what i'm putting all my eggs into, the basket. That's why I'm learning to be good at broadcast, God. Another opportunity for the top dogs of YouTube to make some money is through tutorials. Edfluence is a course that you guys can take right now online. How to do social media secrets, tips, tricks. These online courses can bring in a lot of revenue. You could even potentially be able to join Team 10

if you take this course. Even though these tutorials have about as much to offer as say a degree from Trump University, Chris doesn't want us to lose sight of the fact that YouTube is an educational medium. That's Rasmus Paladin. Like Jake Paul, he sets stuff on fire in his YouTube videos. But he doesn't burn mattresses.

He burns Quran. And now it's burning. Like the faith of Muhammad, and Muhammad himself is burning in eternal hellfire as the fucking swine and dog and pig that he was. He came to power basically through YouTube, putting up this sort of extremist content and he's parlayed this into a kind of mainstream political career.

The first time Rasmus tried to get on the ballot for elections in Denmark back in 2017, he couldn't even get 300 signatures. This year, after studying YouTube, he got over 60,000 votes. He has built up an audience through YouTube and he's kind of formed his political beliefs and managed to share them more widely through YouTube as well. Rasmus is by no means the only far-right politician harnessing the power of YouTube. The left wants to censor what you say, to control your decisions, to tell you you can only agree with them. I'm on YouTube.

Join me in making Britain great again. YouTube is helping the fascists build their brand. Self-avowed fascists basically said that YouTube was the main thing that red-pilled them, which is really alarming when you think about it. Like, you know, this is something that is kind of shifting the political center ground way to the right just by its existence and through the algorithm. As we were putting this episode together, YouTube made headlines

with vague promises to regulate hate speech. But Chris worries that the damage has already been done. Our asses have already been torn apart. We are almost at the point where it is too late to regulate or too late to legislate

on this sort of stuff. You think about how long some of the biggest alt-right or right-wing extreme right-wing youtubers have been posting there are kids out there now who are sort of in their teens who will have grown up on this so the horse is almost bolted before you can actually shut the door. Like, this may be something that we can't claw back. If we truly hope to understand YouTube's relationship with antisocial content, I've always believed that we need to first come to terms with YouTube's history,

specifically how the company dealt with copyright, both as a startup in 2005 and as a Google acquisition in 2006. In his book, Chris revisits this history as well. YouTube is essentially a risk-averse company. They are reactive rather than proactive, and they've managed to get away with it for 14 years without anybody really holding them accountable. In December of 2005, YouTube got one of its first mega hits, a short video from Saturday Night Live. It was called Lazy Sunday. Now, it was not SNL or NBC or Viacom who uploaded this video,

but it remained on the site for months despite their protest. People came to see Lazy Sunday and they come back the next day and YouTube has a captive audience. The reason why YouTube became quite so popular was essentially it had a very lax approach to copyright. I moved to New York in 2006. And I remember that summer, YouTube was everywhere. It was the official jukebox for bars and cafes and parties.

It was also a real turning point for the internet, because suddenly there was an actual site, one site that had everything you wanted to watch or listen to. This was also the summer when YouTube totally destroyed the competition. I interviewed people who were working for competitors at the time, and obviously it's a bit of sour grapes because they didn't end up making a multi-billion dollar company at the end of it as a result of YouTube's different approach to copyright in the early days, but they were kind of frank about it, and they said that they thought YouTube capitalized on other people's commercial works.

In October of 2006, when Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion, it promised copyright holders that the theft would end, that their rights would be respected. It even introduced tools like Content ID that would take down copyrighted material. But in my experience, after Google bought YouTube, it became even easier to find and watch things that were absolutely in violation of copyright law. Legally, we're not going to say that Google was condoning copyright infringement. Oh, of course. Certainly not. But like, the company has done really well to overlook a lot of its issues.

And that kind of dates back to the very early days. It overlooked the issue about copyright. It overlooks a lot of the issues about societal impact now. Through the lens of history, we can better understand what YouTube means when they use big words like responsibility. At the, you know, sort of the top of our pyramid, quality and responsibility right now. That's Susan Wuchitski, the CEO of YouTube, speaking at the Code Conference in Arizona, June 10th. We talk about responsibility. Every single public pronouncement that they make will start with the word responsibility.

And I've been really clear that this is, that responsibility is my number one priority. And they've chosen responsibility for a reason. It's an attempt to say that they are going to do something about it without actually necessarily doing much about it. You do need to have more of this responsibility. They will do everything that they can to try and give off the impression that they are on top of this stuff and yeah that's probably based in a lot of legal advice whereas actually if you kind of scratch the surface you find that they're doing everything they can to distance themselves from a lot of this stuff When I decided to call this Theory of Everything miniseries failure, I had no idea how pertinent, how relevant the word would become. A descriptor, not just for the content of these episodes,

but for my podcast itself. I feel like the word has been tattooed on my forehead. But as we stand here together, dear listener, surveying the wreckage, basking in the infernal flames, I just want to make one thing clear. I take full responsibility for this fiasco. I'm the one who thought a tour through the netherworlds of YouTube would make for great podcasting. So stop emailing TOE's Andrew Calloway. Stop complaining to Radiotopia and PRX. The buck stops with me.

With hindsight, I realized my first mistake was believing that I could reframe the discussion. I thought I could take on the bad people who, with rank hypocrisy and evil intentions, have framed the discussion about YouTube's anti-social content as a free speech issue. In order to stave off regulation, Google has weaponized the free speech YouTubers, amplifying any and every troll who trumpets the company line that the only solution to hate speech on YouTube is more speech on YouTube. It will take someone with far greater talents and abilities to expose how false this is. All I got for my efforts is this pile of correspondence from angry listeners accusing me of standing with the censors,

the expungers, and the bowdlerizers. Six months ago, when I began this mini-series, there were only a handful of reporters seriously talking about YouTube. And while I do take heart that there are now many, many more, I also believe that there are structural limitations when it comes to print journalism. In order to truly understand how dank, how destructive YouTube has become, I'm convinced you need to experience it. It's the same with the concept of algorithmic hopping.

Sure, I can explain to you how YouTube's recommendation algorithms are nudging people to click on videos that celebrate misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and crazy dangerous conspiracy theories. But unless you follow the AI yourself in real time from a starting point of your own choosing, you just can't see how close the darkness is. It was my belief that I could take this mini-series to the next level simply by including sound from actual YouTube videos.

I believed that I could use sound to expound on YouTube's recommendation algorithm and how it is leading us straight to hell. This was my gravest mistake, believing that audio provided me with some sort of advantage. Oh God, was I wrong about that. Let me tell you all about the fury and the sound of YouTube audio. Let me show you this other pile of angry correspondence. Letters and emails denouncing me for platforming racists and fascists and misogynists. I even got an email furious that I'd given the platform a platform. So like I said, when I decided to call this Theory of Everything miniseries failure,

I had no idea how pertinent, how relevant the word would become. A descriptor not just for the content of these episodes, but an epitaph for my podcast itself. I hope it is enough for me to tell you that I am taking responsibility. And I hope that my saying this is enough for us to move on. After an appropriate period of time, during which I will reflect upon my bad judgment and personal failings, of course. What do you think?

A week? Two? Perfect. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. And it featured Chris Stoeckel-Walker, whose new book is called YouTubers. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.