Populist amateur video production requires disregard for others’ safety

Evidence

Cooke argues that the desire to film oneself driving is intrinsically masculine; its implicit danger requires an internalized masculinity, a fantasy of mastery over machines, a fantasy that presumes a coherence among one’s ability to drive, one’s ability to be inattentive and negligent about one’s location in time and space, and one’s aptitude in controlling the manifold technologies in use: “Car camera guys—they’re almost always guys, and for the sake of argument over 40—require a certain level of comfort with mortality, but also a brazen confidence in the driver’s ability to drive safely independent of other cars suddenly eating shit. It’s also the most ridiculous aesthetic for asserting this sort of tossed-off masculinity, and makes the video an afterthought to wherever they’re going.” The car camera guy, as a particular kind of person, draws attention to the implicit recklessness of driving while filming, which, to be sure, descends from the lengthy genealogy of masculinity, bridging fantasies of domination with idiocy and self-assurance. Its democratic, populist appeal can only be made through a form that, quite directly, does not give a shit about the safety of either oneself or others. … To be like others, to be “democratic” or “populist,” in the capacity to record and share requires one to not care about one’s effect on the lives of others. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the car as one of the book’s four infrastructures; the driving-and-filming site fuses self-promotion with recklessness toward fellow road users.