YouTube serves as an unusually complete archive of lived capitalist culture.

Evidence

As will also become clear, we believe that YouTube is particularly useful in visualizing contemporary capitalist infrastructures in this moment. YouTube provides an unusual (and unusually large) set of documents through which our “lived culture” is expressed, refined, and archived; YouTube’s videos, in acting to document our present, could be said to “correspond to its contemporary system of interests and values,” to use the words of theorist Raymond Williams. If we are interested in charting how people live through and make sense of what we might term “platform capitalism,” to use one name for the context in which social media and digital technology have reinvented the capitalist base, we must look at the texts made and practices performed within this context—though, we believe that an emphasis on “platforms” only begins to approach one part of our current moment. To provide an immanent critique of contemporary capitalism, we must engage with the products of social media, not just at the level of industry but at the level of subjectivity—especially when subjectivity becomes the commodity into which labor power is fashioned. But this explains why YouTube is a particularly useful archive. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 57

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that YouTube documents its society’s ‘system of interests and values’ (Williams) supports using creator content as primary evidence for the Corpocene.