YouTube and the Fakery Phenomenon.

I’m becoming very disappointed with YouTube lately. What started as an interesting little platform for people to ‘broadcast themselves’ (as YouTube itself styled the process) has become a veritable cornucopia of all human life (plus aliens, cutesy animals, robots, and AI generally.)

All for the good you might say, but there’s a problem. The parasites are breeding so fast that the platform is now awash with an infestation of click bait opportunists. Those of us who are a bit savvy in the matter of human nature and modes of communication soon learn to spot them. They show pictures of the great and good on their thumbnails – Carl Jung is a favourite – to lead the unwary into the delusion that they are being offered words of formidable sagacity. They make outrageous claims which are so outlandish that you’d have to have an IQ in single figures to take the bait. They hype up the adjectives – ‘terrifying’ is one of the commonest – in the hope that those with an IQ in single figures will leap in to have their education augmented. And no doubt the boys at Google are clapping their hands and salivating copiously because they know that the more hits these channels get, the more billions Google make in the process.

And this is a shame because there are good channels on YouTube; the problem is finding them. I’ve found a few and they are now regulars, but I seem to spend more and more time scrolling down my recommendations and finding little more than click bait rubbish.

This argument applies to more than just YouTube, of course. YouTube is only one leading example of the fakery by which we’re surrounded in the modern world. Meanwhile, the media finds an ever-increasing list of diversions to keep the tramliners distracted. We have endless game shows, lifestyle shows, ‘reality’ shows, shopping channels, soaps, etc, etc, etc. And elite sport is growing at such a rate that you can watch your favourite player or team in some major championship or other nearly every week, comfortably closeted against the fakery and thereby failing to notice the absurdity of it all and the slow slide towards a totalitarian future. And I used the word 'diversions' earlier, because maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe it’s deliberate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I know nothing, really I don’t. But I’m sure I see a pattern emerging here and I don’t much like it.