Status Update: 7/13/26
Creation Under Consolidation
Lately I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with my work and how to achieve that in the current online sphere. My goal, as someone passionate about public history and culture, is to find a path towards inspiring people to engage with community care.
I fell in love with criticism because it made me feel like I could participate in art, rather than consume it. The videos and essays I read inspired me to treat the act of viewing as something tactile, an act of deconstruction and reconstruction. That is what motivates me to create. Criticism is a medium in which you view art alongside an audience. But as the internet increasingly censors and consolidates the mediums of communication and creation, that participatory core gets cut out of the process.
The modern video essay is the best example for this. The medium itself is older than the internet, with roots in documentary and lecture. But what exists on YouTube now has changed from that origin. The market has become oversaturated with channels dedicated to contemporary drama that fades from relevancy by the next week. It’s a negative worldview that digs through the sleaziest parts of the internet and asks for your anger as attention in return, all with an ironic distance to feign absolution. Or maybe you’ve seen the channels that explain a topic based off a few skimmed articles and Wikipedia. There’s plenty of variations, but the style is the same.
These channels came to exist because of how YouTube has designed the platform. The sink or swim build of the algorithm has evolved the video essay towards views and clicks. This has created its own genre of “YouTube video essay,” with its own aesthetic artifacts and audience expectations. It is a medium based on consumption, not participation. Videos that you listen to in the background. I know because I do the same. It does not ask you to engage with the work, because if you left, they would lose out on retention. Instead, it treats the work as synopsis, satisfying enough to feel you know the subject without needing external study.
This isn’t to be overly cynical towards these creators. They are simply adapting in order to make a living. And with the modern creator economy, YouTube has dictated that this style is what will be prioritized. The algorithm built the creators.
It is possible to create thoughtful and inspiring video essays, but even still, it is YouTube’s. You may own the video, but Google owns the means of distribution. Because of that, your work will be loaded with ad breaks that disrupt your pacing while also distracting viewers. Copywritten material will be struck down or claimed, regardless of whether you have the legal right to use it. Certain words will flag their automated system, blacklisting topics from public discussion. Again, the YouTube video essay is its own medium, influencing the creator at the pre-production stage.
This isn’t just a YouTube problem. Every social media platform designs the content it distributes based on how they design their algorithm. The TikTok video essay is different to YouTube, Substack is different to Tumblr, and Podcasts have their own ads blended into their respective streaming service’s ads. The platform owns the content. Not in a literal sense, but because they have consolidated the paths towards distribution, they hold what you upload. What can a creator do, upload as a Vimeo exclusive? Build their own video hosting platform?
The problem is not because video and audio has made viewers passive, as easy as it could be to blame young generations. The work of Spalding Gray, Mike Birbiglia, and Lindsay Ellis has shown the power of spoken essay as performance of narrative and information, and audiobooks are a wonderful way to read in a busy world. The problem is delivery. I’ve felt these same pressures influence me. The line between engaging people with history has been transformed by the creator economy. Do I make a podcast, a video essay channel? My thought has been retrofit to the content expectations of algorithms. Even in terms of activism and politics, it feels as if I have to talk about everything because if I don’t, who will? When my state’s public lands get sold off, do I make a vlog series to get people to care? In a culture that feels isolated, that puts responsibility on the creator over the community, and that profits off of attention, it makes sense why this is how culture portrays participation. But this is a faulty form of thinking manufactured by social media that demands more content and viewership. Content creation is not the praxis of politics.
This is the part where I would give a satisfying answer, but unfortunately, I don’t have one. I am still trying to think of what I want to do, and why. I keep turning back to the foundation of participation and inspiration. I want to make work that feels complete in its own right, not to be consumed but to be engaged with. Writing worth discussion as part of a community.
One thing that has become clear to me is that I need to focus on intentionality. In a creator economy that demands regularity and reaction, patience and deliberation carry power. Rather than reviewing everything, I would prefer to write about the work that inspires me to write, good and bad. An important part of criticism is the ability to digest the messy and crowded art world in order to spotlight the work that deserves attention. It is simplification for the benefit of both audience, whose time deserves respect in a culture where that is a commodity, and artist, who deserves real engagement for their hard work.
I’m going to focus on what inspires me. The works of narrative that engage me the most and excite me enough to give the energy to write about them. I’m going to continue to work on my blog, because it is mine. I don’t want to bend myself to the YouTube video essay or the podcast, reformed to fit into algorithmic production and time-based sponsorship contracts. I know that means I’m cutting out a massive percentage of my potential audience, but I’d rather talk to a handful of people that really care about community rather than leave them for the many who want passive entertainment.
This reads a bit cynical for what I want to say, because I find myself at a point of deep inspiration. I keep finding art that challenges and provokes me. There is so much I want to talk about, but again, time constrains me. I think that’s for the better though, because it means I must focus on what I care about the most. I’m not sure what mediums I can follow in the future, but I am excited to explore. Take care, whoever is reading this, I hope I can inspire your own passion as well.