YouTube and Radical Change

Control and power over audiences and content within global digital networks cannot be reduced to a replication of the twentieth-century social order and its broadcast media systems. The power to influence the beliefs and wants of individuals is limited by the enhanced agency and relative autonomy of networked individuals and YouTube audiences. Networked forms of amateur videography represent a radical change in who can say what, where. In the following I argue that, given our shared context of climate crisis and civilisational collapse, media systems such as YouTube contain within them unconstrained voices that represent the potential for radical change. Radical change is ill-defined among scholars. For our purposes here it is best thought of as the heretical. Under capitalism, ideas such as collective ownership are seen as heretical. Under the type of brutal authoritarianism we witness arising in the United States, kindness and empathy are seen as radical, heretical values. To understand the potential impact that YouTube embodies we first must correctly model the overall social context and the character of the Internet itself. In this essay I argue that the social context YouTube users find themselves in is one of impending civilisational collapse due to climate change. I also argue that within YouTube and across the Internet, we can readily witness the relatively unconstrained voices of ordinary people as they challenge the status quo. The context of unravelling social, political, and environmental conditions provides a motive to use a relatively unconstrained media system – Internet plus YouTube – to voice discontent and create alternatives to corporate and state-driven culture. Therein lies our hope: unconstrained networked voices resistant to authoritarian powers. In a time of great crisis, the possibility of radical change is found wherever we have a voice. Media platforms such as YouTube are shared locations where people get together and watch videos and express ideas that promote all manner of social change. YouTuber channels promoting awareness about social issues, such as the environmental scientist Simon Clark, attract over 657,000 subscribers. Likewise, YouTube connects videographers to audiences seeking all manner of political and personal change. In a world beset by multiple existential crises, any place that provides ordinary people with a voice is also a place of hope. The past century demonstrated capitalism’s ability to co-opt the autonomy, creativity, and productivity of individuals to its own ends. Consider, for example, how every instance of resistance, such as the 1960s’ ‘flower child’ moment, hippie culture, or punk rock, were reincorporated into capitalism as a new series of lifestyle products and services. Within the Internet, capitalism continues to co-opt human creativity. Yet the very tools and capabilities that it has promoted can also be used to resist, subvert, pirate, and hack control. One need only search for videos about the famous Barbie doll to witness how amateur and professional videographers use YouTube to modify, create, and circulate cultural objects that undermine the priorities of capitalism (see Williamson; Greenpeace UK; The More We Know). For example, Greenpeace UK and The More We Know posted videos on YouTube in which they used Barbie and Ken to publicly call out Mattel’s unethical manufacturing practices and devastating environmental impacts. The manufacture, distribution, and disposal of 60 million Barbie dolls each year contribute to pollution and an estimated 3.4 metric tons of CO₂ (Briscoe). Within YouTube we witness a growing form of ‘toy’ or ‘craft’ activism where individuals and artists use commercial toys like Barbie and Ken to challenge and address societal issues (see Singleton; Heljakka). But can anything fundamental change within local or global social orders because of networked ideography? If we are to gain insight into the impact of YouTube and the Internet we need a reasonably accurate picture of the general state and direction of global civilisation. Context greatly determines the motivations for use. What is the context of YouTube’s content creators? Apologists for capitalism such as Jeremy Rifkin, Don Tapscott, Kevin Kelly, and Chris Anderson envision a new and improved economic system emerging around us (Yeritsain 6). According to these apologists, capitalism will repair itself. Or, as Wolfgang Streeck argues, capitalism is “disintegrating before our eyes” and is no longer able to underwrite a stable society. There is overwhelming evidence that validates Streeck’s observation that the incumbent management of capitalism is “uniquely clueless” (35). What is our immediate future going to be like under conditions of climate change and the crises of capitalism? Pessimistic realism argues that we may be facing a long period of social, political, and economic instability and the deterioration and collapse of a wide variety of physical infrastructure. If this model of the world order and its immediate future is reasonably accurate, it raises the central question herein: can people use enhanced capabilities of communication, cultural production, global distribution, and collective action in a time of extraordinary crisis to bring about radical change? Beyond Capitalism 2.0 The political economist Streeck argues that we are entering a prolonged period of systemic disintegration wherein people lack collective political capabilities. Streeck’s theory of change argues that we are entering a global condition of disorderly social instability that is not subject to change because people cannot act politically in a collective manner (“The Post-Capitalist” 69). There is no shortage of reasons for seeing the current state of individuals as substantially de-politicised. Union membership, voting, and group participation in all forms have been declining for well over half a century. Both liberal and postmodern theoreticians speak of a hollowing-out of democracy as citizens lose the ability to influence local politicians, politicians lose the ability to influence party leaders, and nations lose political autonomy to international institutions and transnational regulatory regimes. Zygmunt Bauman aptly describes the planetary state of affairs as buffeted by unconstrained conflict among discordant powers, a loss of political control over the elite, and powerless political institutions (52). The convicted felon Donald Trump’s rise to political power is highly suggestive of such a failure of control by political institutions. Bauman stays true to the Marxist theory of change and bemoans the Internet’s erosion of collective political action. He claims that there is a widespread tendency to replace effective participation in institutionalised politics with woefully inadequate experimentation in “electronically mediated quasi-or-inchoate/incipient politics” (Bauman 52). The Internet, Bauman argues, enfeebled political action. Of interest here is the common line of thinking within Marxist theories of change. Both the otherwise insightful political economist Streeck and the inspiring philosopher of postmodernism Bauman defer to dystopic media theory to support their argument that radical change is stalled as a result of the politically debilitating effect of the Internet. But what if Streeck and Bauman have misread the individual’s political potential within networked environments? Certain strands of media, political economy, and postmodern theory argue that the Internet reduces the possibility of collective action because it fosters a politically disempowering individualisation (Dean 45). Under networked conditions, social life is said to be highly individualistic, anti-collectivist, and therefore politically impotent. Again and again we encounter the familiar claim that can be summed up in the formula: capitalism plus the Internet equals no change. Yet the Internet and services such as YouTube have enabled a form of enhanced agency that partially yet significantly escapes the domination of capital. Thinking about the Internet’s radical potential requires that we take Fredric Jameson’s words seriously; we must do the “impossible” and grasp with our minds “the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism” (47). Dystopic media theory empties networked cultural production and general Internet use from all positions except domination. It reduces online communication and storytelling to a mere reproduction of exploitative labour relations. Such negative appraisals of the Internet’s potential invariably leads to overstated claims that fail to offer a satisfactory account of the resistive and alternative voices heard within YouTube, voices that stand in contradiction to the interests of domination and capital. One need only look to the activist Greta Thunberg’s YouTube channel to see such resistance in action. For individuals to be politically effective they must be able to participate in the production and circulation of culture – shared meanings. In the twentieth century individuals were the recipients of images, words, and stories that were produced by the market and the state. This established the predominantly one-way media monologue that formed a highly constrained mass society. Yet under the present condition of climate crisis and rising rates of extinction we find an increase in the plurality of voices and an erosion of social order. In this time of civilisational collapse both the dominant media system and our motivations to communicate have radically changed. The switch from the broadcast media system of the 1900s to the networked media system of the 2000s gave ordinary people cost-effective tools for modifying state and corporate messages as well as creating their own words, images, videos, and meanings. Digital systems enhance personal agency. Thus, great crisis – the crisis of the digital age under the pressure of rising totalitarianism and climate crisis – brings with it enhanced opportunities for change. Yochai Benkler describes the networked individual of the Internet age as benefitting from an increased degree of freedom to engage in cultural production and exchange (293). This increased degree of productive freedom is a source of power that is difficult to control or regulate because it is “not amenable to formal regulation, management, or direction” (Benkler 298). Similarly, I argue that YouTube’s potential for radical change is a result of its ability to increase communicative and productive freedom. YouTube’s affordances greatly enhance decommodified and unconstrained production and are building a vast collection of cultural objects that do not fit within the socialisation processes of capitalism (Strangelove 229). These cultural objects fit within an alternative ‘symbolic’ economy. The Internet, in conjunction with sites such as YouTube, has enhanced the creation and exchange of images, words, and videos (meaningful symbols) that challenge the values of the dominant economic order. Before we can build a radically different social order we need radically different symbols (cultural objects) that act as the raw material for alternative ways of being. The Alternative Symbolic Economy A symbolic economy is a broadly defined concept within cultural theory. For some it indicates a “resistant space appearing outside or alongside the exchanges of people and things” (Cummings and Lewandowska 109). The symbolic economy is the sum total of expressive and productive activity – all objects, words, music, images, architecture, clothing, brand names, toys, artwork, and countless other forms that transmit meaning. The symbolic economy denotes the entire field of meaning-making activity. All human communicative and productive activity constitutes the symbolic economy. The rise of the Internet has expanded the field of objects and meanings that constitute the symbolic economy. The symbolic economy was once primarily the result of the industrialised production of culture. Now unconstrained expressive freedom within YouTube and across the Internet is creating a competing field of meaning, an alternative symbolic economy wherein individuals can create and transmit meaning and digital objects outside the economic imperatives of private property, commercial exchange, and profit. Industrialised cultural production shaped thought and action through the controlled distribution of meanings and commodities. The rise of an alternative symbolic economy opens up space within the social world for generating alterative patterns of values, thoughts, and actions. In an unjust, unequal world filled with suffering and environmental destruction, the growth of an alternative symbolic economy is inherently political in nature. It provides a space for the expression of discontent and resistance. For example, in a YouTube video that exposes the exploitation of the Chinese factory workers who make Barbie dolls, viewers learn that workers face harsh sweatshop conditions, earn an extremely low salary, and are deprived of union representation, the ability to air grievances, and lack written contracts (The More We Know). Anthony Barry draws our attention to how the Internet’s existence as an unconstrained space is a threat to domination: “one of the key functions of established political institutions has always been to place limits on the possibilities for dissensus and restriction on the sites in which political contestation can occur” (207). Political contestation occurs across YouTube and the entire Internet. Thus, YouTube has become a problem for power, a problem that has no easy solution. YouTubers can speak out against power and contest the messaging of state and corporations (and they certainly do). Consider the example of the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, which is followed by over four million subscribers and produces videos that attract hundreds of thousands, and sometimes over a million, viewers. The hosts of this channel, John and Hank Green, address a wide range of social and political issues. YouTube is densely populated with similar voices, ranging from amateur to professional, that are intensely political in character. As a communication system, YouTube operates as a space that is not oriented exclusively towards profit motives. Many people, indeed millions of people, use YouTube to contest the claims of states and corporations. Thus, YouTube users and the Internet community are not entirely subject to the values of those who dominate production and distribution. Therefore, we cannot assume that the systemic biases of an industrialised mode of cultural production are the same biases found within the Internet’s alternative symbolic economy. The Internet has created a form of difference that has political implications. From an anthropological point of view, human action is innately political because it constitutes an ongoing debate over what type of society we want. Our consumption choices, conversations, and everyday interactions involve explicit statements and implicit meanings that communicate tastes, values, preferences, and judgments about the world we live in and the world we desire. Anthropologist Mary Douglas referred to this as the normative debate, the constant struggle to define what should be seen as normal (132). While the long trek to modernity ensconced political action within formal institutions, the anthropological reality of the personal, the everyday mundane acts of getting by, remained part of the political process, a collective involvement in creating social order. Mundane amateur cultural production and everyday conversations, such as are found on YouTube, participate in the political and generate potentially radical consequences. Online action cannot be completely dominated by the forces of capitalism. Within conservative, liberal, and Marxist political theory it is common to encounter the claim that radical change has not yet occurred, and cannot occur, because no viable alternative has been put forth. This strikes me as the equivalent of blaming the victim. We have failed to propose something better so we are stuck with capitalism. Consider how Perry Anderson, writing in the New Left Review, claims that the lack of an alternative to the status quo of consumer capitalism “blocks the likelihood of any profound cultural renovation” (112). Yet, the twentieth century did not lack viable alternatives to capitalism. The broadcast age of the last century lacked mass participation in the production and circulation of raw materials for creating new social orders and realising those alternatives. Trapped within capitalism’s value system and confined to the weak position of working with industrialised culture, cultural renovation was restricted to the reformative and progressive. In the broadcast age of the 1900s, the communicative and productive infrastructure for radical change was not available to ordinary people. Thus, capitalism became a victim of its own success as it accumulated crisis upon crisis. Democracy, when captured by wealth and lacking an honourable and effective opposition, degrades into tyranny. Capitalism’s success rested upon its ability to marginalise alternatives. The radical quality of the already-existing Internet is found in its ability to circumvent capitalism’s forces of marginalisation and expand the individual’s creative and communicative resources. Extending productive and communicative capabilities to marginalised groups and increasing the individual’s ability to participate in cultural production is not simply additive to capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself. Context is not everything, but it is terribly important when it comes to how and why we act. In a world filled with suffering, inequality, rising tides, and exponential extinction rates, unleashing the creative and communicative capabilities of the marginalised masses of a world in pain does not bode well for the one percent. Media theorists often claim that radical change is not possible because the Internet is little more than a commercial media system. Consider the claim made by the Marxist theorist Christian Fuchs that commercial social media, sites such as YouTube, “do not constitute a public sphere” (60) – a place for the exchange of opinions and debate. Likewise, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum we find the liberal legal scholar Lawrence Lessig arguing that the Internet would be turned into a “tool of perfect control” (268). Yet what do we find across the Internet? Countless cultural objects that individuals have modified, such as commercial images tagged with words (memes), original creations, and contention. A mass involvement in making meaning, creating, debating, and exchanging information is underway as a result of affordable access to powerful multimedia tools, freely available online services, and global networked connectivity. This outpouring of creative activity is a result of the Internet’s facilitation of non-commercial cultural production and unconstrained expression. In our contemporary context perhaps nothing is entirely non-commercial or unconstrained, but such qualifications are of minor significance. In the field of human action nothing can be said to be entirely free from the influence of its context or entirely unconstrained by external and internal conditions. Radical change does not require absolute conditions to be met for human action to be effective. Regardless of the structural constraints of commercial media, the Internet manifests radical potential because it represents that which cannot be totally controlled by the state or the market – human creativity, the desire for expressive freedom, and in many instances, an awareness of the abuses of domination and a desire for change. In a context of growing climate crisis, this failure to control creativity and expressive freedom has led to enhanced debate over capitalism’s values. The Political Potential of the Internet Anthropological theory gives warrant to the claim that all human speech and action are political – we are all involved in constituting social reality. Feminist theory reminds us that the personal is political. An awful lot of what we say and do is political in nature. The narrow definitions of political speech and action amongst political scientists, along with the penchant for empirical analysis that fails to give “serious attention to street-level give-and-take of contrary viewpoints” lead to a theory of change that evacuates the Internet of much of its political vibrancy (Hauser 89). Nonetheless, and quite correctly, Karine Nahon likewise suggests that “where there is social media there is politics” (55). As numerous scholars have argued, ordinary “political conversation in online spaces whose primary function is not political, can have real democratic value” (Wright 255). The politics-as-usual argument that nothing has changed is littered with overgeneralisations and flawed assumptions. We have reason for hope. The voices of discontent that can be found on YouTube are evidence that civil society and democratic practices are enriched by YouTube’s affordances of enhanced communication capability. The individual’s political capacities within cyberspace are sufficiently robust enough to evade totalitarian outcomes that eliminate the possibility of radical change. In the context of multiple regressive forces emanating from the state and the marketplace in the twentieth century, a constraining media system sought to contain and control the audience. Nonetheless, during this period of high control we witnessed incredible moments of liberation and progressive politics. What will happen when crises escalate and accelerate under the forces of climate change? We will continue to make videos that express resistance to domination and hope for a better future. As we move into an era of climate-driven catastrophes, the empowering affordances of a global digital network hold forth the unsuppressed potential of radical change. Summary Media theory and anthropology tend to express the same insight: thought is social in nature and is highly dependent upon the available means of expression. YouTube represents a radical change in the available means of expression. A theory of how YouTube and its ‘container’, the Internet, hold the potential of radical change must explain why Internet-enabled action creates potential for change. The answer lies in one of the most distinctive aspects of homo sapiens – our ability to create and transmit meaning across space and through time. On YouTube our voices are far from being completely suppressed or utterly censored. YouTube users regularly encounter storytelling that is politically consequential, voices that motivate people to collective action, and content that escapes the constraints of states and markets. 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