Hater Moment: The Video Essay

2024 was the year I relied on video essays to get me through a shift at work; 2025 is the year I fell out of love with them.

The thing is, I get why they've gotten bad. 99.999% of video essayists can't afford to be the next hbomberguy with a patreon that keeps them afloat even when they've been radio silent for months-to-years, actually doing the research and keeping their nose to the grindstone. The algorithm demands blood.

It looks simple. All you need, technically, is a camera and a computer with basic editing software. You just need to talk straight to camera about something that interests you for an hour (or more. or WAY more.) and SOMEone will enjoy having your babbling in the background to work to or sleep to or whatever. And that was totally me, to be fair! I put on the 8 hours or whatever of iCarly reviews!

But then the oversaturation started. Because it's easy, right, anyone with a camera can do it, and we here on youtube have a refined attention span -- not like those wretched tiktokers¹ and their (increasingly long, btw) short form videos that couldn't possibly get the nuance across that a full video essay can. The popularity of the longform video essay kept growing and increasing demand to the point where it became entirely unsustainable, because you CAN'T talk for hours on end about a topic every week and still have time to research what you're going to be saying for all that time.

So then you get the most insidious thing, I think, which is a anti-intellectualism cloaked in creators looking smart for the camera and consumers feeling smart that they "watched" a 3 hour video on some book they'll never actually read and absorbed MAYBE a third of that content while they were playing balatro². This came up for me when I was reading Ayan Artan's in defense of pretension and she mentioned Jeremy Strong being the talk of twitter for weeks for using the word "dramaturgically." 

And THAT, in turn, made me think of the video essay I had to click out of because the creator went on about how the writer of a book she was reviewing "won't tell us what an oubliette is and uses the word octogenarian" like oubliette and octogenarian were jargon impossible for the lay reader to understand.³ Or to, like, google.

Not everything needs ten dollar words of course, but sometimes the ten dollar words are good ones!

And like, it's a money thing, right. Mr. Beast's videos make money, so every video on the platform that wants to make money has to be Mr. Beast, even if its entirely incongruous with the desired product. And when you're making these videos to support yourself, especially when it's just you and no team behind the wheel, you have to sacrifice to the algorithm gods as often as physically possible in order to keep up. For those people just trying to make it, my heart goes out to them, it really does. But also, I shouldn't have to eat their slop because that's what youtube thinks I should be consuming today?

So it's not really the creators I have a problem with in the end, it's the platform and honestly, like...the culture. And capitalism, honestly, because if we had something even as basic as UBI, creators could afford to take their time and not monetize every single possible interest for massive consumption.

...

Anyway. I think I'm going to go back to random synth albums as my background noise for a bit.