My nine-year-old son is lying on the floor of our living room, Nintendo Switch in hand. But he's not playing a video game, he's got the YouTube app open and he's watching someone named BeckBroJack narrate as he (BBJ, not my son, who has Minecraft on four different devices, which is information that will be relevant once you finish this sentence) plays Minecraft.
Meanwhile, my almost-four-year-old daughter is curled up on our couch, Kindle in hand. She too is watching YouTube. An adult's hand comes into the screen, opens one of those plastic easter eggs, and describes what is inside.
Whatever word can be used to describe what they are doing right now (YouTubing?), they will continue to do until I stop them or they complain that they are hungry. They will never get bored or run out of content.
In the background, my new 48" Smart TV—equipped with Netflix, Disney+, Hulu Live, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime—sits idly on the home screen and I cannot help but wonder: with all the resources, talent, and incentives, why can't these Entertainment moguls develop programming that can compete with the trash my children watch on YouTube?
I think the answer is what I call the Gatekeeper effect.
YouTube, for the most part, has no gatekeeper. As long as you don't violate community standards, which are tough to enforce given the quantity of videos uploaded each day, anyone can upload almost anything. No one from YouTube has to greenlight anything and most of the uploaders are not getting paid.
YouTube programming works not too differently than viruses. A virus, like COVID-19, wants to copy and spread itself. Each time an infected person coughs, it's like a buckshot of tiny mutations of the virus swimming through the air, looking for a new host. The virus does not know which mutation will be more contagious so it just chooses randomness over and over again until one sticks and now you need a new vaccine booster.
In essence, YouTube is different than Netflix because it does not pay its content creators and therefore has no expectation for the quality of the content they produce. It allows for a bunch of crap to pass through, hoping something sticks. When it does, the creator gets immediate feedback and reproduces (ie copies) that type of content over and over. Since there is no oversight, each content creator is able to respond to the changing tastes of their subscribers.
I know these billion dollar enterprises like Netflix and Disney are not known for their moral standards, but one thing they have that the YouTube model does not is the ability to say "We can't put this out there."
YouTube has no such gatekeeper.
So the reason Netflix and Disney cannot compete with YouTube for my children's attention is that they cannot respond quickly enough to what youth are into and they care too much about their institutional brand to allow their content creators to produce whatever they want without a gatekeeper's approval.
The tradeoff is that ever so often I catch my son watching something on YouTube with a swear in it. Using parental settings, that is not a problem on Netflix or Disney+. (I know about YouTube Kids but my kids complain that it doesn't have the shows they like.)
Rise of the Bottomfeeders
Media companies used to compete by trying to be the first to break a story. Fox News found a better way to compete. Instead of trying to do a better job of reporting what the other companies were reporting, they focused on reporting what the other guys were not reporting.
They became bottomfeeders.
What they realized is that if everyone ignores a story because it's false you can report on it under the guise of "this is what the mainstream media won't tell you." And as long as the liberal media is the enemy, your conservative audience won't penalize you when your story ends up a lie. All you have to do is get 1 out of 100 underreported stories right to confirm what your viewers already believe: the mainstream media is biased against people like you.
This phenomenon has accelerated since Fox News launched in 1996. Every year there are more and more bottomfeeders publishing false stories, and more and more legacy media companies ignoring true stories. Even Alex Jones, who is mostly wrong and mostly crazy, is right about the gay frogs thing. And he's right that no one else reports it.
Let's say CNN had a 60% liberal bias in 1996, and that meant that of the stories they did not report, 80% of the time it was false and the other 20% was because it had a conservative angle they did not consider because they were too orthodox. Now it's probably a 75% bias and 60% of unreported stories are bullshit and the other 40% they just missed because of that bias. That's more food for the bottom feeders.
More and more journalists are leaving legacy media for Substack newsletters or Spotify podcasts, which have the same model as YouTube; low barrier for entry, most make no money, and there is no gatekeeper. But now the bottomfeeder model has morphed into specialization journalism; they aren't exactly reporting false or misleading stories but they're only telling you one angle and audiences are self-selecting the angle they prefer.
Consider Bari Weiss, who can be described as "antiwoke." After leaving the New York Times, she started her own podcast. Here are her most recent episodes:
"The Real Story of 'The Central Park Karen'"
"The Truth About Testosterone"
"A 21st Century Witchhunt"
Her angle is to tell the side of the story the mainstream media left out, as evidenced by the Central Park Karen story. Weiss and Kmele Foster tell Amy Cooper's side of the story, which broadened my understanding of the event without necessarily exonerating her. Their point wasn't necessarily to paint her as the real victim and Chris Cooper as the bad guy, but to fill in the missing blanks left by the mainstream media's reporting.
Typical responses to her work do not attempt to disprove her reporting, they just focus on the facts she (Bari) left out.
This is the tradeoff of specialization reporting and the lack of institutional gatekeeping. There is no incentive to complicate a narrative and tell the whole story. There is no one to tell Bari that she might sound too dismissive of Amy Cooper's perceived racism. Instead, the incentive is to specialize in one area that you find sticks with your audience and spoonfeed it back to them over and over again.
A World Without Credentialed Doctors
Imagine a world in which there is no barrier to becoming a doctor. You don't need a medical degree, a residency program, or to pass an entrance exam. You can just call yourself a doctor and start treating people.
First off, costs will come way down. Simple supply and demand. Struggling Americans will seek out the lowest credentialed doctor because they charge the least.
But what happens in a world in which the medical profession is not an institution? There is no Hippocratic oath. The doctors become completely responsive to their patients' most base desires. Hypochondriacs will receive whatever treatment they want. There is no gatekeeper practice telling doctors "this is unethical."
We also get into the Tragedy of the Commons problem. In an "every doctor for himself" world, what's to stop doctors from prescribing antibiotics to everyone for every problem? Before long bacteria has built up enough resistance so that antibiotics no longer work. The point of institutions is to solve the Tragedy of the Commons and it usually works.
I agree with the libertarian take that occupational licensing is mostly harmful, especially as it relates to social mobility for struggling Americans. But the medical profession is one that I think we have right. Technology has yet to disrupt it the way it has journalism and entertainment.
Technology has made journalism and entertainment more democratic and accessible and has had a lot of positive effects. But it's also amplified our worst impulses and challenged the limits of liberalism.
Temperance
One of the best essays I've read in the last year is Aaron Sibarium's response to Francis Fukuyama's defense of liberalism. Essentially, Aaron states that mass communication is at a place we've never had to deal with before. Liberalism worked when there was still some gatekeeper who could filter mass media. The printing press had a massive effect on the rise of Protestantism, but printing companies were still gatekeepers.
YouTube and Substack, and their lack of a gatekeeper, are testing the limits of liberalism like never before. How can we "live and let live" when there is so much dangerous information freely available?
"Let the platforms police themselves, and you’ll end up with either a dangerous free-for-all or an arbitrary regime of censorship, enforced by bots and billionaires rather than the public.
Police the platforms through the state, and you’ll end up limiting freedom of association, either by requiring platforms to host speech with which they disagree or by preventing them from hosting speech deemed indecent, mendacious, or hateful.
Destroy the platforms by revoking Section 230, and you effectively concede that some forums are so dangerous that they can’t be allowed to exist—a conclusion that contradicts liberalism’s spirit, if not its explicit premises."
YouTube's Pleasure Lever
I told my son he needed a break from screens and he asked me why. I relayed to him the story about the lab experiment on rats where scientists installed a lever in the rats' cage that, when pushed, would stimulate the reward system in their brains.
Some rats pushed the lever 7,000 times in a day.
"rats preferred pleasure circuit stimulation to food (even when they were hungry) and water (even when they were thirsty). Self-stimulating male rats would ignore a female in heat and would repeatedly cross foot-shock-delivering floor grids to reach the lever. Female rats would abandon their newborn nursing pups to continually press the lever. Some rats would self-stimulate as often as 2000 times per hour for 24 hours, to the exclusion of all other activities. They had to be unhooked from the apparatus to prevent death by self-starvation."
I explained that watching YouTube was the equivalent of pushing that lever. It's a shortcut to that reward feeling that slowly kills your soul because you're denying yourself the labor, socialization, exercise, reading, or some form of intimacy that should naturally lead you to that same feeling.
There has to be some type of societal reckoning where we realize that specialization media feels good but is bad for us. If we don't actively do the work to temper it, it will destroy us, much like a virus. All it wants to do is copy and repeat, find a new host and spread. It cares nothing for the damage it leaves behind.
