Post-Genre, Post-Utopia: Contemporary YouTube Production Cultures

Abstract

“Post-Genre, Post-Utopia: Contemporary YouTube Production Cultures” draws upon media studies, labor studies, and political theory to investigate how social media platforms engage U.S. free speech ideology in their governance practices, creator labor cultures, and economies. While legacy media presently face increasing political pressure to prioritize speech’s financial consequences over the freedom of its expression, social media platforms have taken it upon themselves to embed this logic directly into their documents of governance and algorithmic architecture. I argue that YouTube reconfigures the right to free speech through its advertiser-driven economy into the right to profit, prompting accusations from creators that the demonetization of their content constitutes a new form of censorship. This conception of democracy, which associates the freedom of speech with its profitability, derives from a neoliberal ethos of self-regulation and financial independence which YouTube builds into its policies to justify flexible governance decisions that maximize advertiser revenue. I trace how YouTube positions itself as having state-like authority to monetize the activity of its users and examine how creators navigate this relationship through an affective economy of negative feeling built on a conflation between moral and economic value. To describe the relationship between democratic ideology, platform economies and creator labor, I engage several theoretical frameworks and objects of analysis. In my discussion of the conflation between economic and moral value and its affective dimensions, I turn to German philosopher Max Scheler’s (1874-1928) concept of Ressentiment. Scheler’s concept serves as an interpretative framework for my interviews with True Crime content creators, who frequently encounter demonetization. I also perform a comparative rhetorical analysis of YouTube’s user agreements and foundational documents of U.S. governance to assess how the platform positions itself as a democratic governing authority. This project, therefore, moves beyond platform studies to attend to the increasing presence of media technology corporations in U.S. political life.