I just got done watching a Leftist Cooks video essay. The title is “when your hero is a monster” with a preview image of Neil Gaiman, but ultimately this isn’t about him, or about any other powerful auteur. The eventual conclusion argues that we should decentre celebrities and mass media. We should instead focus on the “basement culture” that we find either in literal basements, or figuratively through online subcultures. “A better world is possible”, and through participating in making art together, we take steps towards building that better world.

It’s an argument I agree with, for better and for worse. I have an uncomfortable relationship with my own idealism, in both senses of the word - I believe in, and long for, a world that is built on higher ideals, and also I sometimes need to remind myself that the world is not made of ideas, it is made of material relations.

Extractive material relations are at play in the very act of watching a Leftist Cooks video essay. I choose to open the Google app instead of something like Peertube, because the video essayists that I enjoy choose to publish on the commercial algorithm-driven platform. The network effect pushes us both into a rentier relationship with Google, even though we already have alternatives available to us. I promise I’m not trying to just say “Youtube is bad actually” and leave it there. I know that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I also know that the point of that statement is not to hand-wave away the significance of our choices.

When the Leftist Cooks praise Youtube video essay culture as a “basement culture” of the internet, they support this with apologism for parasocial relationships. It’s all the usual points, made with a fresh set of examples - parasocial relationships are actually not totally one-sided because creators have a relationship with their audience, and actually most fans are really respectful, and a lot of fandoms facilitate horizontal relationships between fans and even encourage people to be creative themselves. It brings up for me a long abiding frustration - why are we simply accepting a state of affairs where our relationships with each other are mediated by our shared relationship with someone who has more influence and cultural capital? What happened to the many-to-many internet?

#Where is the basement?

In fact, right before the Leftist Cooks video, I watched a Rebecca Watson video where she explains that Bluesky is absolutely set up to enshittify the exact same way that Twitter did, and that the Fediverse is her preference when it comes to actually remedying the problems with online culture. She also talks about the loss of blogging culture with the decline of RSS, and explains how RSS structured audience relations differently to our current reality. Those are exactly my feelings on this, perhaps because I share those memories of the RSS blogosphere era.

I’ve written about these feelings before, several years ago. To be honest, whenever I think back to that series of posts I cringe. My inner critic says that I shouldn’t have expressed these kinds of frustrations publicly, that I betrayed ugly feelings of resentment, that anyone involved in Youtube who read those posts probably hates me forever, and this kind of thing is why people are awkward with me at parties. Also, the use of O Fortuna was a bit dramatic. But my inner critic should cut me a bit of slack on this one, because the core issues I wrote about back then have only gotten worse, and I have only learned more and more lately about the real alternatives that others are working hard to build together.

When video essayists say “a better world is possible”, I kind of wonder why they are not contributing to building that better world through the material relations enacted in their own work. By all means, post on Youtube - but why not also post on your own site? Indeed, Rebecca Watson posts transcripts of her videos on her own site, which is lower cost than hosting her own videos, and supports accessibility, as well as independence. And why not post on a Peertube instance, so that people can enjoy your work while materially contributing to the distribution of network power into more collectively owned spaces? Of course, there is Nebula, which is a fantastic project demonstrating the strengths of the platform cooperative model, but it still relies entirely on Youtube for audience building and artist discovery. Nebula feels even less horizontal than Youtube when it comes to dialogue with viewers. It’s the John Lewis & Waitrose of user-generated content - yes, technically it’s a worker-owned cooperative, but it’s also by nature quite an exclusive institution.

I just don’t think that success on Youtube is equivalent to “basement culture”. Youtube is not your cool friend’s underground venue. To give another British corporate analogy, it’s a Wetherspoons - and by all means, play gigs at the Wetherspoons because god knows we need to do whatever we can to support our art! But don’t neglect the chance to build something better together.

My heart longs for a Peertube instance, or something similar, that centres the conversations that I want to be a part of. I want a place I can post my own niche shit and know that the 50 people who see it will be absolutely here for it. Every few months I go looking around for an interesting and active Peertube instance, and I haven’t yet found it - please tell me if you know of one! I suspect that for something like this to work, it would require someone with network reach to bring a few friends along. But maybe it just takes a dozen of us who enjoy each other’s work to commit to a posting schedule, borrowing a strategy from the pre-algorithmic era of Youtube (e.g. Five Awesome Girls, Brotherhood 2.0).

#Interactive online culture

This is all on my mind at the moment for a couple of different reasons. I’m dreaming of a Peertube or Owncast instance for interactive online theatre and performance, as part of the roadmap for the software I’m building with Squinky (part of the Intrapology project). This is not only because the way our shows function requires a user interface that has extra features compared to Twitch or Youtube, but also because the potential of the Fediverse inspires me. The opportunity cost is also relatively low for us, because as far as I know, there isn’t an existing subculture for this particular type of online artwork on any of the commercial platforms - so perhaps our discovery problems present us with an opportunity to build it ourselves, in spaces that we actually control.

I’m also more generally trying to get caught up on the IndieWeb movement. It’s not exactly that I didn’t know about it - my first movements into games and online writing in 2011 were facilitated by unconferences and other spaces that are associated with the IndieWeb, but back then I just took that to be internet culture itself. I’ve been trying to spend more time on Mastodon, and while doing so, I’ve learned about practices such as POSSE and PESOS, and many different website creation tools that centre the intrinsic joy of making things on the internet. Something in me is being validated by all this. In 2021 I knew I hated what was happening to digital arts, but I didn’t know what words to use to describe the thing I’m for. I think I’m finally on the right track, because I’m finding so many projects that open with statements about not just rejecting corporate tech, but embracing joy.

This is what the latest episode of Intrapology was largely about, though I do hope to get an opportunity to more strongly connect the different themes of that episode together. Originally, it was going to be a big rant about collective action problems, and people’s failure to build a better world together. But then I realised that it had to be grounded in joy, because people simply do not know what was lost as the internet became more and more commercialised. The more I try to get my head around the challenges of building an audience for something like Intrapology, the more I think the only sincere way for us to do this is for us to reject the aspirational dream of virality, and focus instead on building joyful communities of practice.