I often watch essays on YouTube. These are filmed reflections which draw on all kinds of disciplines from the human sciences in order to analyze a culture which, because it is embedded in the web, is increasingly visual. Accessible, colorful and funny, this type of video could perhaps become an important dissemination channel for the intellectual left.
According to Alice Cappelle, a French YouTube essayist with whom I spoke in connection with the publication of her first book, Collapse Feminism, some content creators do not hesitate to invest time and effort in the sets and costumes that serve as a backdrop for their story. So, in a visual essay, ideas are not simply communicated by what is said; they are also dependent on choices of staging and editing.
Once shared on YouTube (or even on TikTok or Instagram), these essays help to mobilize communities of Internet users who work to pursue the thoughts put forward by their authors by writing comments or making their own video.
Driven by a desire for accessibility, YouTube essayists speak in a loose language, sometimes far from academic jargon, but very often in the lingua franca of the Internet, that is to say English. When Alice Cappelle started her YouTube channel in 2020, the history researcher wanted to get back to basics and share her thoughts with as many people as possible. Today, she has more than 327,000 subscribers.
Conservative strategy
In his brand new paper essay, Collapse Feminism, Cappelle proposes to investigate the strategies used by conservatives to disseminate their ideas online. The author looks, for example, at the circulation of right-wing discourse in digital communities centered on well-being, popular psychology, feminism or even “ self-help “. She analyzes figures like that of the #girlboss and delves into the misogynistic digital communities that make up the manosphere. In fact, we can consider his book as a sort of synthesis of several YouTube essays. Cappelle never hesitates to connect the voices of his fellow YouTubers like Contrapoints, Tee Noir, oliSUNvia and Tara Mooknee with those of great feminist theorists.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY REPEATER BOOKS
Alice Cappelle, YouTube essayist
“When I started writing my book, I was inspired by what Susan Faludi had done with Blacklash in 1991,” she says. In Backlash, Faludi analyzes the conservative backlash that took place in the 1980s, in the face of feminist advances in the 1970s. According to Alice, even if this type of backlash is still more or less present in culture, there are periods when it takes on more importance. The author therefore sought to know how this decline was embodied today within a post-#metoo web.
According to Cappelle, the backlash current situation is caused by the desire to entertain of those who fuel hate speech.
The YouTuber tells me that this conservative backlash has intensified in parallel with the growth of the American media Daily Wire, a multiplatform company founded in 2015 by political commentator Ben Shapiro and director Jeremy Boreing.
The entertainment that the Daily Wire produces stirs up outrage to stimulate online engagement: that’s how it captures our attention. Its sensationalist and scabrous content is favored by the model of feed (flow) algorithmic, because it makes us react, regardless of our political allegiances. It travels more quickly and reaches as many people as possible. Worse than that: we divide long filmed interviews into small punchy extracts which subsequently become reels or TikTok clips. “A simple interview of an hour and a half can thus give rise to a multiplicity of videos which will be viewed thousands and thousands of times,” explains Alice.
Way to go for the left
Faced with this well-oiled hate entertainment industry, progressives are dragging their feet. Of course, they sometimes adopt and copy the media strategies of the right, such as the culture of debate, in which discussions are staged where opposing points of view confront each other. However, progressive thought adapts with difficulty to the logic of outrage, in that it seeks first to educate and encourage critical thinking; not to shock people. In fact, if the aim of the game is to be as sensationalist as possible, progressives are guaranteed to lose. But rather than playing this losing game, Alice told me, the left should find its own form of entertainment.
To be able to imagine this type of entertainment, we must first review the architecture of the entire web, since the goal of the networks that currently structure it is to maximize engagement, to then generate ever more advertising revenue. According to Alice, as long as we have a for-profit Internet, our horizons will remain blocked. By bringing together the voices of several YouTube essayists in her book, she attempted to lay the foundations of a more collective web. She dreams of a deprivatized internet.
Collapse Feminism
Repeater
222 pages