Grave-Robbing on YouTube and the Ephemerality of Digital Youth Culture: Hybrid Content Farms, Mobile Consumerism, and the Snapchat Psychological Traps

This 50-page bilingual study (English/German) examines the modern exploitation of human attention and time autonomy in the digital age. The first part dissects the economy of hybrid content farms on YouTube. It demonstrates how these channels covertly weaponize artificial intelligence without labeling it as AI-generated content, allowing them to extract massive monthly revenues ($20,000 to $60,000 per channel). As a primary case study, the paper exposes the hyper-frequent, automated exploitation of the recently deceased celebrity Presley Gerber, a phenomenon completely bypassed by YouTube's current monetization algorithms. The second part contrasts mobile-first consumers with traditional PC users, analyzing the impulsive "shock-and-forget" consumption loop of commuters on public transit who create a landscape of volatile "ghost subscribers." Finally, the study investigates the psychological subjugation of adolescents in Austria and Europe via Snapchat's "Streaks" feature (Flammenzwang). It analyzes how behavioral design experts in Silicon Valley systematically exploit evolutionary tribal instincts, trapping a highly vulnerable demographic in a cycle of digital extortion and permanent presence, ultimately leading to a historical cultural vacuum where a generation's biography vanishes into an ephemeral void.