Would You Like To Know More?

The YouTube algorithm isn't any better or worse than the ones running any other social media soma distribution system. It gets a slightly less dystopian rap than the ones aimed at the impressionable and wayward youth, but I think that is less a comment on its qualities and more that it has never been wholly owned by a hostile foreign government for the purpose social infiltration and engineering. With YouTube, we had already proved we could do undermine and spy on ourselves. Plus it has become more associated with Millennials, whom we've somehow always assumed were lost anyway, so addressing it has felt less urgent. Sure, it will suggest a video for something unrelated to anything else in your feed that you had only recently had a conversation about or, magically/creepily, had only thought about, but that's a level of invasive sorcery we've not only grown accustomed to in our tech, but we seem to be actively pining for more of in the fantastical fever dreams of what "AI" is supposed to become capable of. While AI won't be able to do all of our thinking and creating for us--the internal agreed-upon lie AI companies tell tech investors as a shibboleth before they pass some more insane amounts of money back and forth--it will do what all tech currently does, which is redistribute wealth upward into the hands of those who already have most of it. In that way AI is almost as quaintly and comfortably conservative as stodgy old YouTube.

I'm neither a child nor a wine mom, so I spend no time on TikTok, but YouTube has slowly taken over my screen-viewing life over the past several years, certainly since the pandemic. The root of it was just to fill the days of lockdown, running long (four to seven hours!) VODs of Critical Role in the background while I tried to exercise or work or catatonically disassociate, all with mixed results. 

As media distribution has fractured more and more since that period, YouTube has come to take up a plurality of my viewing time. I think for most us, there is no "majority" anymore for what we consume on whatever platform as there are just too many goddamned options. This is much like the way voting seems to work now as well, at least for this cycle in California where I live. Instead of a couple of funded and visible candidates slugging it out, basically everyone has decided they should be in office. I can't tell if it's because media content creator culture has convinced everyone they should be able to launch themselves into the public consciousness with little or no effort or if things have just gotten so bad, way more people than normal are jumping in trying to help. I'm going to gently suggest that with 61 candidates on the ballot for California governor, two of whom are named Barack D. Obama Shaw and LivingForGodAndCountry DeMott, it might be the former.

In my own district, gerrymandered in a counter-move in the very stupid national game to rig the election in favor of one party over another, we got to chose between two incumbent Republicans, five democrats and one unaffiliated rando who doesn't understand how the American duopoly works. The overall idea is going to get the desired result: one of these two Rs will eliminate the other, leaving the GOP at net minus-one nationally. I get it. The lines had to be drawn that resulted in me being stuck in a roughly +10 GOP leaning district instead of one that used to be pretty purple. And in California, the jungle primary system means the top two vote-getters move on to the final contest, regardless of party. Because there are (and I'll say this in italics again) five Democrats running, they have split the vote and will definitely leave us with these two Republican incumbents--or as I like to call it, no actual fucking choice--on the November ballot.

I get it, there's a larger cause. There is a president to rebuke and a whole arm of government to re-establish as a functioning component of civil governance per its constitutionally mandated role. People can argue all they want about what the Founders may or may not have wanted, but they made the whole Article I about just the legislature, so maybe that could do the minimum parts of its job.

But I keep thinking about this YouTube video I got recommended about a drone service in rural England that finds lost pets in the countryside. In this 3-4 minute video, it was actually about how the drone service failed and one of a lost dog's dog-friends had to lead rescuers to a spot where they discovered the lost dog had been chasing rabbits and had become stuck underground, entangled in tree roots. They had to dig the dog out by hand, which they did. The rescued dog, being a dog, was completely peppy and non-plussed post-rescue, just happy to be a dog, incapable of gratitude really or self-recrimination.

So like, I'm happy to do my part I guess and get stuck with the same GOP member of Congress who has been haunting my electoral life since I turned 18, but inside a district like this, where you know what the outcome will be and also that you've been forced to live within a fence with only the worst of your neighbors, I can't help but feel a little like the dog who got stuck underground chasing rabbits. Only in this case, I've been put here deliberately, so there's no drone service coming to help me out.

At least I'm stuck down here with my phone. It's not easy to breathe, but at least I've got videos of professional actors playing Dungeons and Dragons to pass the time.