If you were to look at YouTube as a whole and try to assess what piece of it is dedicated to what you or I would consider high-quality journalism, it's a vanishingly small part of the overall ecosystem there.
You can hear the audience immediately react whether they realize it or not. they have an understanding of what everybody has deemed is more attractive and more beautiful. So already I'm kind of like showing the audience that like we're all a little complicit in this.
I think the legacy media is not equipped to deal with um uh a politics where just like one side is just like wrong like one side is just like saying things that are preposterously untrue.
I think we're more custodians of the culture, right? We're here to facilitate conversation about the things that we enjoy. We're here to make connections between um cultural objects or cultural productions. Um we're not here to tell you what to do. We're here to sort of like push you to think, which seems to be an unpopular thing these days.
I'm kind of thinking now, seeing the world the way it is, if I had my druthers, they'd be considered cautionary tales, not aspirational. I don't know, maybe we've had enough anti-heroes for a while, seeing the country the way, the shape that it's in.
If you're saying there's such a thing as too much violence, then you're automatically saying there's such a thing as just enough. You know what is too much rape? I don't understand. What is just enough rape?
When you look at the history of those projects and when you put them all together, there's no way around it, it does not look good. It does not look like good business. And it looks like it's certainly not favorable to its black creatives. That's what it looks like. So I'd be ignorant if I didn't, I'd be willfully blind if I chose not to make that observation.
You need to separate the tech from the tech companies because then you're going to start finding interesting things like real experimentation and real people with values. Until you do that, you're just going to be stuck in the hype cycle.
But if we're all in this together for the good, we're definitely all in this together for the bad. Heat waves, wildfire smog, explosive diarrhea, political minations between the US and FIFA. I can't help but wonder, are we the drama?
Love Island gives us an opportunity to have some really healthy conversations about sex and dating and I really love that aspect of it. What I haven't appreciated this season and especially last season um because I think it all stems from that. It's starting to feel like there's this default to receive things or receive people in bad faith.
The problem with Sunday's broadcast wasn't the fighting. The problem was the tonally incoherent emulsion of patriotism and blood lust. History and by this crap an event happening for the people but tucked behind a paramount payw wall.
It's a place where the financial incentives of the influencer economy crash right into the rigors of traditional journalism — and as regular Decoder listeners know, I have a lot of questions about how those two things work (or don't) in the modern media landscape.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
