The Rise of “Breadtube”
(written 4/1/18)
In September of last year, a friend and I were chatting online about the Charlottesville protest. I had just watched a VICE video called “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” showing some of the outright bigotry on display by some of the white supremacists at the march as a reporter followed them and challenged their views. I sent her the video, and she agreed about how scary it was. In response she sent me a video by a youtuber named ContraPoints, titled “Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@cist”. Curious, I watched. In the video, ContraPoints describes ways in which people on the authoritarian right use coded symbols and names to disguise their true beliefs and make them more palatable. She uses a style which could only be described as “aesthetic”, with pink and blue light bathing each shot. She deploys a combination of comedy and incisive political analysis that never gets boring, almost like saying “if the alt-right can rebrand itself, so can the left.”
Initially, I would never watch political youtube videos, my time spent dedicated to watching video essay upon video essay, analysing how David Fincher hijacks your eyes, or how Edgar Wright excels at visual comedy. But after watching ContraPoints’s video I began to avidly consume her content, quickly moving to other similar youtubers like HBomberguy, Shaun and Jen, and Thom Avella. I found myself agreeing to many of their points, and while I had cared about social justice ever since middle school, it had always been from a removed, neo-liberal perspective. But I had never truly been exposed to even the idea that the injustices I perceived in the world could come from the fundamental makeup of the structures we live in. I started to wonder if anyone had has the same journey as me, considering how prevalent the use of Youtube has become.
The internet has created a medium that is more conducive to politics than any other before, and according to Pew Research Center, 52% of 18–29 year olds often get their news online, compared to 23% who get their news on cable television. Out of all the students that I talked to, every single one said that watching a video was more stimulating than reading an article. They also said the most important factors in choosing to watch video content over reading an article were its ease of use and accessibility, its visual aesthetic, its length, its accuracy, and the personality displayed in the content. In addition to this, most said that usually they would watch a video based on its creator, and seek outside knowledge if the video was on a topic they didn’t know that much about.
A creator consistently cited was Vox Media, a web publication that has a very active youtube channel that creates videos about global and national news, but also human interest and edutainment stories. Vox has created a recognizable form with sleek graphics and friendly hosts, which is attractive for talking about unattractive subjects. This, in conjunction with their coverage of the election, is likely the reason their subscriber count has jumped from 42,000 subscribers in January 2016, to 3,665,000 subscribers now.
But the rise of political Youtube may not prove to be the end of traditional media. Multiple people cited Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah as sources of news through their Youtube channels. With their high production value and dependable release schedules, they have a leg up over the “youtuber”, who usually has to handle the brunt of writing, production, and editing by themself. They are some of Youtube’s most heavily promoted content, often ending up on the trending page due to their advertiser-friendly content and large viewer base.
Still, ever since last year’s election, both the left and the right have seen a huge increase in popularity, with many students I interviewed saying that Donald Trump’s rise and surprising win contributed to their renewed interest in politics. As young people see their world shifting farther and farther into the corrupt ideas of conservatism, they are often holding onto their liberalism even more steadfastly, to a point where “liberal” has become a synonym with “left wing”, and “libertarian” has been co-opted and twisted far past its original anti-capitalist origins. This is best shown by an idea known as the “Overton Window”, meaning the window of beliefs that are acceptable in public discourse. Right now, with a conservative government, the Overton window is shifting farther and farther right, where traditional conservatives start to seem like centrists, and the alt-right seem to only become more popular.
But the alt-right aren’t the only outside political identity to be growing. More far-left positions, like communism, socialism, and anarchism, are gaining traction among young people. While it might be expected of any generation to rebel against the ideas of the past, there is something different about what is happening in the internet age that is affecting young people’s political opinion. “Yeah, memes turned me communist,” Olive Bernstein, senior, said, laughing. “No, I mean- not really, but yeah.” It seems only inevitable that as memes become more and more prevalent, that they spread into the realm of the political. Ridiculous though it might seem, just as how television and movies legitimizes stereotypes by normalizing them, memes do the same for political ideas. An anonymous senior told me, “If, for example, you have a friend who’s leaning pretty left, and they follow a communist meme page, and they show you all these hilarious memes, and you’re like ‘Haha, that’s pretty funny, I agree with that’, you’ll want to make it seem like you agree or that you think it’s funny and you want to participate, and I guess that will ultimately lead you through the wormhole of being a communist through memes.” Laughing at communist memes is just one more step to genuinely being interested in its system of beliefs. This works on both sides of the political spectrum- for examples, think of the “triggered” meme of last year. Originally a phrase used to stereotype feminists, along with the term “SJW” (short for Social Justice Warrior), it became so ubiquitous that it ended up being used just to something you were angry at. The problematic aspect of this is that it delegitimizes a word used in the mental health community usually to describe something that might cause a panic attack.
This is only one instance of how memes can have harmful, if seemingly insignificant, effects. Other examples might be “I identify as an attack helicopter”, the word “thot”, or the “Ugandan Knuckles” meme. Even the seemingly innocent Pepe has been co-opted by the alt-right and is now labeled as a hate symbol. Not only do these memes normalize making fun of marginalised people, it can also lead to the spread of political ideas like fascism just as easily as it can lead to communism. It’s not a very big leap to go from laughing at a picture of Pepe with a swastika doing a hitler salute to hanging out on 4chan, a breeding ground for overtly racist ideas on the board /pol/, to genuinely calling yourself “not a white nationalist, an identitarian”. It is this slippery slope that is creating a new surge of white supremacist violence, with the Southern Poverty Law Center identifying over 100 people killed by members of the “alt-right”.
Of course, not all memes make you a white supremacist, and not all white supremacists developed their ideology from memes. But there is certainly a correlation in validating memetic ideological jokes and people beginning to genuinely believing in that idea. It is hard to pinpoint exactly where such unexpected political unrest among young people is coming from that so many are moving to outsider stances, but it’s clear a majority feel the government is doing an inadequate job. An AP-NORC study of 790 teenagers found that 6 in 10 felt that the country was headed in the wrong direction. In addition to this, 29% said they identified as Democrats, 23% Republicans, and 24% Independent or another party.
When I became interested in ContraPoints, I didn’t know that it would lead me to changing the way I see the world. And stories like mine may be growing, as entertainment becomes indistinguishable from education. It seems only inevitable that our politics cycle becomes completely digitized, and the democratization of platforms like Youtube means there are more voices than ever before. Outside political groups have larger bases than ever before, with how easy it is to find a viewership, and engage with the politics themselves. With such a growing party of people disillusioned with our political state and rising political engagement, this generation may be the most politically active that we have seen in decades.