The Malaise of Video Essays
The Malaise of Video Essays
The emergence of the video essay as a cultural phenomenon is more than just a quirky trend; it’s a symptom of the West’s broader failure to harness and cultivate its productive forces, a visible marker of our economies slowly unraveling. On a macro scale, it reveals a profound mismanagement of labor—watching as a generation’s potential is funneled into crafting endless hours of content, dissecting Shrek or analyzing video games, instead of engaging in work that builds or sustains society. In China, the youth are driven by the desire to contribute to tangible progress, to build, innovate, and drive their nation forward. But in America, the dream has curdled. We’ve settled into stagnant niches of pseudo-intellectualism, finding comfort in the shallow pursuit of online validation within a system that has long since given up on real advancement.
Our failure is glaring. We no longer even pretend that we can send our youth to universities to study subjects that matter—if they do manage to attend, we burden them with crippling debt, forcing them into absurd career paths where ad revenue from lengthy video essays becomes a lifeline. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that these pursuits have some intrinsic value, when in truth, they are little more than distractions in a society that no longer knows how to channel its workforce effectively. This should be a source of deep embarrassment—a nation once proud of its industrial might, now reduced to a hollow shell, its workforce chasing clicks and likes in the absence of real opportunity.
Capitalism, with its endless rhetoric of innovation and efficiency, has failed us. If capitalism truly optimized labor and resources as it claims, we would see the fruits of that efficiency in our infrastructure—in high-speed rail lines connecting cities like San Antonio and Austin, enhancing mobility and productivity. In China, such connections are not just ideas but realities, tangible proof of a system that recognizes the value of investing in its people and their ability to move, work, and create. But here, in the heart of the capitalist West, we languish. Our labor force is squandered on content creation that serves no purpose, producing nothing of real value, a testament to the unproductive reality of our so-called efficient system.
The irony is stark—capitalism, in its current form, is profoundly unproductive, a fact laid bare for anyone who takes a cursory glance at the vast ocean of content on YouTube. The platform itself is a monument to our collective failure, a digital wasteland where the intellectual potential of a generation is frittered away, not on building a better future, but on the futile pursuit of relevance in a world that no longer offers them a meaningful role. In this sense, the video essay is not just entertainment—it’s a quiet cry of despair, a reflection of a society that has lost its way, where the dreams of the young have been reduced to the pursuit of fleeting digital fame in a collapsing economy.
In China, the youth are driven by the desire to contribute to tangible progress, to build, innovate, and drive their nation forward.
Lol kids really don't give a shit about this
“In China, the youth are driven by the desire to contribute to tangible progress, to build, innovate, and drive their nation forward.“
This is just positive orientalism, this is just a repackaging “Japan is good because honour and samourai”. The work condition in China is improving for the cities, but people are apathetic and thinking people care about nation building is delusional (and also sus)
Also imagine there are no people in China who are not terminally online like any nations with an internet access.
As an Asian youth, this is not really orientalism. Obviously, we suffer from laziness and apathy as much as people from other countries do, but we do get pushed into STEM fields culturally. And there is an expectation by our parents for us to become productive members of society. And many of us do internalise the idea.
I mean, 80% of the men in my extended family are in STEM or construction or the like (not a joke or hyperbole). This is mostly because there is a huge demand for these fields given how important they are for developing countries, but the material base does impact the culture of a society. I know many Indians who lament about the youth wanting to become youtubers instead of astronauts.
Is this a bit? Am I stupid?
YouTube essays (despite many being awful) are art. We live in a society of excess and made up jobs where the work of middle management is useless and wasteful. I understand you are likely talking about people just generating endless nonsense on a schedule just to make ends meet but you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. Even the most frivolous or trivial essays are infinitely more valuable than being a bean counter at some hedge fund or an engineer at Raytheon.
Labeling art as “unproductive labor” is bullshit. Is capitalism causing an endless amount of drivel to be created? Yes. But if the alternative is no written art is available because it’s “unproductive” I don’t want to live in that world either.
As they clarified in the comment, they are talking about it as a systemic issue of overproduction of pop cultural analysis slop indicating that production is breaking down. That does not mean they assert a better society would have no such slop, but there wouldn't be a billion little channels talking about the semiotics of parapa the rapper.
Let's use another situation, one in which everyone made Serious Kingdom Hearts pachi-slot lore analyses and no one did agricultural labor. Surely you agree that such a society would die, right? Or even if only a vanishingly small group did agricultural labor? So wouldn't it be rational to say "Let's pull back a little on slot machine backstories so we can eat," right?
So when you look at the catastrophic problems occurring around us today, surely we must conclude that the labor force is being underutilized getting diverted to telling us about paremovedo ball dialectics?
one in which everyone made Serious Kingdom Hearts pachi-slot lore analyses and no one did agricultural labor. Surely you agree that such a society would die, right? Or even if only a vanishingly small group did agricultural labor? So wouldn't it be rational to say "Let's pull back a little on slot machine backstories so we can eat," right?
but that doesn't represent the current world at all either, it's a crisis of overproduction not a crisis of underproduction. We are doing this stuff because we already have the production to give everyone a proper standard of living, not because people want to parasitically, uh, not starve to death while still pursuing philosophy (which is way more important than 90% of "productive" shit anyways)
Overproduction of slop with only hobby gardeners doing agricultural production would be a great sign in FALGSC.
It's only a bad sign if instead of automation you have a facsimile of it in the imperial core supported by a global system of ruthless exploitation.
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Most video essayists seem like underemployed English or philosophy majors and generally the sort of people that probably wouldn't be out there building railways if Patreon didn't exist
I get that impression, too. A lot of them would like to become writers or do literary analysis, except those are kept behind paywalls and nepotism. YouTube has basically replaced what radio used to be for local musicians.
You see this in other fields across YouTube as well. A lot of artists do YouTube/tictok/whatever tutorials because they can't make a living on art. Makeup tutorials by people wishing they could be professional makeup artists working in television and film. Cooks showing recipes. Et cetera etc. and so on and so forth ad nauseum across multiple platforms, hoping to make it big so they can quit their shitty retail job in order to work on their craft full time.
underemployed English or philosophy majors and generally the sort of people that probably wouldn't be out there building railways if Patreon didn't exist
I wish English/Literature/Philosophy types had more options. It kinda sucks that outside of academia teaching those things there doesn't seems to be a good venue for them to make some decent income.
Unironically they are probably the best undergraduate degrees for people people going into law. Of course, the problem becomes getting into law school and then being able to afford it. And since we live under capitalism, lawyers who do pro bono work or are public defenders get paid like shit while corporate attorneys make bank.
oh shut up. you've never been to china. you've never talked to a chinese teen and probably haven't talked to an american teen either in a long fucking while. teens don't watch fucking video essays, like what are you even talking about.
I'm having a hard time parsing your comment combined with the graph, are you being sarcastic? It looks like teens in the West do watch a lot of YouTube videos based on the graph
If you actually looked at the graphs my point would be obvious. There's barely a difference between the answers that kids in china, the uk or the us give. Sure OP would want you to believe that all kids in the US want to make useless Youtube Essays and all kids in China want to be productive for the good of the glorious chinese nation, but the actual difference in numbers is just 12 percent.
And the jobs the kids actually name are all the same anyway, and none of them would be "productive" jobs according to whatever ass-backwards view of productivity OP has.
what the fuck how does China's section total up to more than 100%
Edit: OH MY GOD ITS PER JOB, NOT PER COUNTRY. SHIT FUCKING GRAPH. YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT
I will say there's a statistically significant difference though. Not large enough to support OP's theory however
This seems long and boring and not worth reading. Could you repost it in a video format?
finance capital is a parasite, and decades of innovation has shown again and again that the tech industry is almost entirely built upon finance capital chasing ad revenue and rents. it functions by creating barriers and charging a toll to cross it, locking things down and charging rent to use them. how can such a system produce anything?
and of course most people will earn far less than minimum wage for the hours they spend producing content to distract everyone else stuck in the same economic position, but the success of a small few will always provide that tantalizing promise of success if you just hustle and grind enough for that sweet patreon subscription money.
This isn't me saying video essays are bad, it's me saying the fact that so many are making them, that our youth are spending their most productive years making "content", it is a sign of ill-managed labor resources. It's systemic. I support a few creators on youtube, I watch this type of content. Yet I know for a fact that a lot of it only exists because of this labor mismanagement. We are living in an ecological collapse and you're telling me the most productive work to be done is a 12 hour video essay on TES?
Reducing people to "labor resources" is demeaning and dehumanizing, especially with the manufactured unemployment everywhere in order to suppress wages and pit workers against each other
To be clear, you DO mean that you think most of these people would be doing other jobs if there were options in their form of skilled labor? Because if so I completely agree with that, there's literally no options available other than that for them and it's a huge issue because we don't need THAT MANY different essays on Avatar the Last Airbender. Deleted other comment because I think it may have been based on bad-faith misinterpretation and for that I apologize.
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The 6 hour bionicle lore video is more beneficial to the society than any slop produced by the mainstream media, if nothing else it provides an outlet for a special interest instead of endless manufactured drama in the entertainment industry or even news
Don't be melodramatic, it is perfectly possible to both contribute to society and produce a 4 hour dissertation on the subject of The Dark Side of Stardew Valley Lore
I do agree though if the point is that these people are clearly willing to do things but the only path that seems available is pop culture analysis, it's just that tbh it's still a pretty small number of people producing these video essays compared to the sheer number of people in a society.
I hate video essays with a passion. Please write it instead, it would be much faster to read it and much easier to look for something in text instead of searching for the exact moment in video.
I like video essays but I do think the standard procedure should be writing and publishing a text essay first then revising it based on feedback from readers before finally adapting it into a video essay.
There are a lot of video essays on YouTube because that's what YouTube's policies encourage.
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you can run more ads on long videos
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low production value means essays can be produced regularly
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one person can make them alone
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they can be about popular topics without worrying about copyright (ideally)
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other platforms are unlikely to steal these videos because they're long, niche, and focused on a personality
- and even if they do get stolen they serve as advertisements for the channel
Having said all that, I wouldn't point to video essays as a failure of capitalism. Try writing an essay yourself sometime, one that's worth reading. It's difficult work.
Yeah video essays aren't an easy or even unproductive form of labor. They're just massively over represented because you can't make money as your average entertainment/non-STEM graduate/writer without using them as a stopgap lifeline
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When I walk (or more typically, drive
) around my city I'm always struck by just how much there needs to be done, and how much effort, time, and energy is wasted on meaningless bullshit. So much new infrastructure needs to be built out, but there's SO much maintenance work that just goes undone because it's not prioritized. "Sorry, we can't maintain the green spaces that we have, let alone build new ones, we gotta bulldoze that homeless camp again."This imples an extremely narrow idea of productive labor which would be incompatible with the majority of entertainment given the significant amount of people who do actually consume said video essays because they are entertaining
Edit: Ok I see what you mean but I also don't think it's particularly clear to describe it as a crisis of overproduction, even though that's probably correct idk I'm not that good at Marxist terminology. Personally I think it's due to an extremely large surplus army of labor. Plenty of jobs could exist and are actually needed but bourgeois business owners have no interest in spending any money on them. Plenty of them include people with the skill set needed for video essays (editing, writing, media criticism, design, confident speaking, philosophical analysis, and oftentimes straight up the creation of things video essays are often about, such as video games or books or TV shows or even more directly instrumental works like educational series or the design of tools and objects used in hobbies and even sometimes whole industries), but from a capital owner's perspective the employment of these people for these things is not worth as much as another marketing team or just another 20$ an hour in their pocket, especially when investors are involved.
What you're left with is practically multiple generation's worth of humanities students, philosophers, social scientists, media critics, media designers and theorists, and other extremely important jobs, with absolute no way to make money from these passions as well as skills without turning to platforms such as YouTube which don't have a direct hiring process or strict employment limit. With the animator layoffs that have happened and all the shows that have been just outright cut out of streaming services I imagine this issue is just getting worse.
So ultimately what we're witnessing is I think what you are saying, but the blame isn't at all on these "content creators" (usually). There is simply no use for what are otherwise socially essential forms of labor from the perspective of the capitalist. I actually think this is exactly what you were trying to say and, correct me if I'm wrong of course, I do think this is supported by how you specified that capitalist "efficiency" brought us to this point. So, it isn't just that capitalism is inefficient, but that when it is efficient it is to the detriment of genuinely essential forms of social labor, leaving said social laborers to either produce nothing and starve, or do the internet equivalent of really flashy begging backed up by their skills so they can get a bunch of people to act like the modern equivalent of a rich patron and fund their works they want to actually do. (The name of the platform people use, Patreon, actually makes this comically obvious)
So I think where I disagree is the idea that people in the US don't want to contribute to society. I think they do. I don't think they are ever given the option to do so in a practical way or as a part of their labor. And this isn't just a humanities or social science thing, look at the entirety of "office work" and retail and all of these pointless ass jobs that exist because they need people to manage their jackoff financial shit. And all the genuinely important jobs (teaching, construction, other forms of physical labor) aren't treated as important as they are and I'm pretty sure aren't practically livable as a primary career for your average person, especially without business contacts to get into a higher paying position. So I don't think your average US worker can access productive forms of self-sustaining labor period. They have no opportunity to do so while also not starving.
Even if you go into the trades you're basically at the mercy of whatever capitalists decide is useful and that's usually erecting the newest Mr Breast 200 Foot Tall Popsicle Stand
What you're left with is practically multiple generation's worth of humanities students, philosophers, social scientists, media critics, media designers and theorists, and other extremely important jobs, with absolute no way to make money from these passions as well as skills without turning to platforms such as YouTube which don't have a direct hiring process or strict employment limit. With the animator layoffs that have happened and all the shows that have been just outright cut out of streaming services I imagine this issue is just getting worse.
you said it better than me comrade
i'm not sure about that, i do think i am just dumb. sorry for taking a while to understand
who knows what it is
the bottom line is they're pretty much all shite and if you watch them you need to take a break from your computer
whenever I've found myself putting myself through one it's been when my mental health is at its worst and I've become an algorithm piggie
this is way more weird of an opinion than the OP lol plenty of functional people watch video essays about their hobbies. It's called Autism and I am proud of it
so many —s
Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one, but not everyone gets paid to share it for hours on the internet.
You are half right. It is a terrible waste that the YouTube branch of capitalism makes people chase ad money by making low-quality imitations of the really inspired video essays. That slop is terrible and those "content creators" don't want to be making it. However, I will strenuously defend the natural inclination of people to analyze stuff and make arguments - the ones doing it for the love of the game. How is your post, and this response, any different than those? We're not producing a commodity or planning a better future. Just keeping our teeth sharp with criticism. It sucks that (since capitalism generally doesn't fund socially-meaningful intellectual pursuits) we have to resort to this water cooler talk so often, but I think some amount of it is good even under communism.