YouTube Homesteading and the Romantic ideal

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ILLUMINATION

11 min readAug 19, 2020

On your homestead you can choose to step out of 2020, you can step out of global warming, climate change, unemployment and pandemics. You can return to a simpler life. Canning and bottling, gardening and building, felling trees in checked shirts and making it all work just like the pioneers has never looked so good. Need to sharpen an Axe? ‘No problem.’ Need to build an outhouse or renovate your own bathroom? ‘Sure, I’ll show you.’

Characters like Cody - also known as ‘Wranglerstar’ from the channel of the same name, and Matt; who lives over at ‘Demolition Ranch’ in Texas , show us a world where self sufficiency meets good old hard work and gumption. Matt runs a business or two, is a Veterinarian and embodies the young Texan lifestyle and the wider story of success in America.

Big wallet and bigger guns. Cody has been broadcasting on YouTube for ten years and is raising a family in a glade hidden in the forest somewhere in the direction of Portland in the US. He seems to have skills in carpentry, blacksmithing, tractor fixing, bathroom renovations, tree husbandry and gunsmithing and he peppers his episodes with heartfelt prayers and homespun wisdom that offer a sketch of masculinity and outdoors life that is both wholesome and appealing. Work montages are interspersed with footage of his baby sitting in the sun and he has a ready sense of humor and an all American appeal. Family man. Tick. Industrious and loving. Tick. Good with guns. Tick.

His Swedish wife, who is known only as ‘Mrs W’, smiles widely and home schools and jars, pickles and cans, and generally seems to be exactly the balance he needs. He was recently snatched back from the precipice of an all out internet war thanks to her intervention. He tried to buy a good ol’ American made hat from one of his competitors; the aforementioned Matt from Demolition ranch and brand it with his own logo, but the sales rep didn’t respond too well and Cody published a blistering attack on the company. Matt from Demolition ranch has an apparel branding company that is bigger than Ben Hur, and Cody; following the advice of his YouTube fans had tried to order some hats. But the catch was that they had to be American made and when he suggested this, the price he got back was nearly fifty dollars.

(The sound of a showdown crept into the writing here, the emphasis and words are all mine and not at all his.)

Now if a salesman cranks up the price on an honest man, who has come to that salesman in an honest way and who just wants to buy 5000 honest Hats for his honest god fear’n subscribers to buy, well that just isn’t right, is it… and well… you could just’a bout guess, what happened then. Before you knew it, the blood fairly rose in that there Cody’s cheeks and he very nearly made a public spectacle over that hat!

The public spat was over quicker than it began, with Mrs W flexing some Swedish muscle to reign in Cody’s killer instincts and persuading him to withdraw his public castigation of Matt and issue a heartfelt retraction. But not before Matt had retaliated and the fires had started to flare. Was it family values or brand protection that were at stake here, was it a moral choice or a hardheaded recognition that they had an overlapping fanbase? All news is good news and a little conflict might serve the channel well, but he could equally destroy that god fear’n, wholesome vision in a petty battle of brands and damage his own base. Either way he retracted that video quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

If you’ve been thinking that these folksy guys are on the same level as Youtube cat video’s from the eighties, then think again, this game has changed. They appeal to some kind of deep need in YouTube society, and they earn more than you’d think. Social Blade; a website that compiles viewing statistics for Youtube, estimates Wranglerstar earnings at between 2.4 thousand and 38.7 thousand dollars a month, which for them is only a B+ ranking. But as Wranglerstar himself likes to say on his video’s. (in a different context)

‘If that doesn’t give you the fizz you’re un-American.’

The top performers on Youtube are of course earning in the tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, but these niche Homesteaders and vloggers are still raking it in, at least those who produce quality video over the very long term. Their success seems somewhat equivalent to the success of a top small business earner might achieve in a large city. For every Wranglerstar there is ten thousand others.

Demolition Ranch, run by our friend Matt, is currently estimated to earn even more than Wranglerstar; between 11,700 and 186,000 dollars a month with a ranking of A-, he has multiple channels and has the added appeal of covering his life as a veterinarian, a social life where he mainly appears to buy guns and military trucks and weaponry at auction and one channel that is entirely focused on gun culture, testing guns, shooting things and getting excited over the loud noise.

Matt’s boyish Texan enthusiasm creates an All American identity that mixes macho credibility with the legitimacy of being a qualified animal Vet (animal vet, I said. let’s not even mention returned servicemen and American identity here) and he has a lifestyle where money appears to be no object. Tick, Tick and Tick. A potent combination of elements of the American dream and a sub-niche that really pays, especially in modern second amendment supporting America. There are plenty of viewers for this particular cocktail of ideas and they buy a lot of t-shirts with pictures of guns on them. Masculinity in this world is inextricably tied to weaponry and land ownership and work ethic (or providing) and the fact that these channels have photogenic and instagrammable young families and smiling wives with the brains and tact to soften the macho macho man routine on occasion, certainly doesn’t hurt the brands at all. The channel model for both is very similar. Same, same but different.

So these guys have a platform and are minor celebrities in their own right, it all really pays off, although not without work, and their brands are hard built and protected carefully. The t-shirts and hats that Matt sells under his video links are produced in his own warehouse, or at least they were a few years ago when he featured them on his channel. A gigantic space that contains row after row of spinning factory printers, eight armed robotic t-shirt printers that generate t-shirts by the thousands with the logo of your choice. Bunker branding he calls it, with the borrowed cachet of wartime language in ‘bunker’ and the faint but intentional whiff of prepping. (camo is his favourite primary colour) This is big business and a small army of friends and associates run the warehouse with capitalist flair.

These are characters who could be seen to really live the lives that God intended for them, they embody the values we miss , they have found ‘success’ on their own terms and have new fangled Drones as well, what could be better? Whatever your flavour of retrograde masculine modelling you can see it on YouTube. Guns maketh the man. Tick. Family loyalty and macho posturing. Tick. Back to Nature like a woodsman? Sure. Shaun James from My Self Reliance has your back. He is building an ever growing complex of rough hewn buildings in the backwoods of Canada. Hunting and trapping for food, and working days so long that seem to go on for months. Every backbreaking felling of a tree and hewing of a board is covered. He is building a complex of outdoor eating pavilions and saunas and cabin extensions and dams and gardens with hand tools and only a little electricity. Even splitting the shingles himself. All with a backdrop of bird calls and silence, interrupted only by monologues that span from the ethics of small business to the challenges of living alone. He talks to us directly from the forest and we all want to join him out there, in a place without pandemics or fear. A place where the water runs clear, your wife looks after the homeschooling and we can go back to the land and work like a man. Finish a Job and stand back and know that it is finished. No rolling deadlines here.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
    There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
    There is society where none intrudes,
    By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
    I love not man the less, but nature more,
    From these our interviews, in which I steal
    From all I may be, or have been before,
    To mingle with the universe, and feel
    What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal”

    Childe Harold.

These are hardly new ideas of course, the colonial catastrophe that is the settling of America is full of men with axes and cabins in the woods and YouTube just continues these stories. These guys online have absorbed these seminal myths and reproduced them in their channels with a vengeance, they proselytize archaic formulations of the world that promise respite from the buzz and hum of the future and the viewer hungers for these frontier formulations with which they too are intimately familiar through school and history books and a million ageing pop references.

The settlement of the west in colonial America was told over the years with as much commercial wrapping and romanticism as anything that Bunker Branding has done with t-shirts and coffee mugs. Wranglerstars homespun wisdom and christian beliefs are as much woven into the weft and warp of modern America as route 66 is woven into the road network, so the modern consumer reaches for these stories of manhood and nature and weaponry and conflict as eagerly as men always have..except now it is the YouTubers who reap the rewards of tapping into this longstanding brand and not the novelists of yesteryear.

In The Deer Slayer, by James Fenimore Cooper (1840), an author most known in the modern age for a different book that later became the film; Last of the Mohican’s, by Michael Mann. We see a similar brand of frontier masculinity, one that would be very familiar to the subscribers of homestead video.

The eponymous Deerslayer himself, has a hard won masculine morality and stance, a morality that might, just like Wranglerstar; retreat from an ill advised conflict over a hat.

This question produced a singular collision between mortification and correct feeling, in the bosom of the youth, that was easily to be traced in the workings of his ingenuous countenance. The struggle was short, however; uprightness of heart soon getting the better of false pride and frontier boastfulness.

The Deerslayer is no shrinking violet however, he later touches on his feelings about conflict

I hold it to be onlawful to take the life of man, except in open and generous warfare.”

and indeed; much like Deerslayer might have done, the thumbnail image for Wranglerstars very next video, immediately after Hatgate, was a shot of his own customised AR-15, the rifle of choice for the modern day American frontiersman. The episode was ostensibly published as a showcase for a new gadget, a new fitted torch for machine gunning things in the dark, but it must be seen as an interesting choice of vlog content for Cody when he happened to be in the midst of a nasty argument with the biggest gunfan on the internet.

Deerslayer, our character for the moment, has the values of a frontiersman and he lays a template for the gun culture that expresses itself in homesteading video’s 180 years later.

“I am no trapper, Hurry,” returned the young man proudly: “I live by the rifle, a we’pon at which I will not turn my back on any man of my years, atween the Hudson and the St. Lawrence.

While Fenimore Cooper draws on the rich colonial archetype of the armed Frontiersman of the 18th century ; Shaun James of My Self Reliance looks back to the traditions of Henry Thoreau himself and combines his cabin life with earnest philosophical musings. His channel is named My Self Reliance and echoes the spirit of Thoreau's transcendentalist classic Walden Pond. No American can get through school without hearing those glorious opening lines.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

In Walden Pond, Thoreau writes of his choice to abandon the city for the country and build his own cabin in the woods, to live deliberately, if only for a while.

There is a great deal of the living myth of ‘living deliberately’ in these video’s, and Shaun James in his Youtube show and Canadian cabin, echoes Thoreau's take on thrift and houses and self reliance.

“Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?”

The last line here is the kicker for me; ‘as birds universally sing when so engaged’…there is a sense of a natural and logical expression of self, a romantic depiction of man in nature that is seen as more natural than civilised life, it is the exact same romantic impulse that drove Thoreau from the streets of Concord to the side of Walden pond in search of solitude and the same impulse that causes viewers to order t-shirts with pictures of cabins on them to be delivered express post to our suburban doors.

What we look for when we watch these video’s on YouTube cannot be underestimated. The same yearnings for escape that created the pastoral poetry of the 19th Century and the Frontier literature of Fenimore Cooper informs the formulations that pervade our personal dreams and inform our YouTube playlists.