When YouTube was young and finding its financial niche, its community and brand were rather rebellious, positioning themselves as alternatives to Old Media. The word “authenticity” became the buzz word of choice to describe what was appealing about the up-and-coming personalities in contrast to their highly-polished prime-time cable tv counterparts. However, the meaning of “authenticity” shifted quickly and meaningfully as it transformed from a descriptor of lived experiences into a bundle of social signifiers used for marketing.

It’s not hard to see why the term was originally applied. Old Media was full of stuffy news anchors, “reality” tv personas, and cheesy late-night hosts. All of them had decades of industry experience informing what kind of things they did and did not project to the audience as well as giant production teams. The sensibilities of the cultures which shaped them were outdated, sometimes in visibly bigoted or harmful ways. Meanwhile, the prospect of owning a webcam, camcorder, and/or mic was increasingly accessible amid decades of marketing to try and sell the tools for making “home movies”. The internet was fast enough in some urban centers to upload short videos in a matter of hours rather than days. The planets were aligned for the glorious spectacle that was… a teenager sitting in their room talking to their webcam for 5-10 minutes. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could draw a fursona of yourself and just post the audio with that static image. The production value was usually minimal at the time, but that was kind of the point.

The process of making that video was easy to understand. You captured a video, maybe you edited it a little, and then you uploaded. If any writing was done, it was done by you. The “authenticity” was a matter of bandwidth. You couldn’t effectively lie about yourself in any ways that weren’t readily plausible to the audience. And then the pattern recognition began.

As with any creative scene, the producers were also consumers of each other’s work and began to borrow ideas from one another. The jump cut was infamous for being a “lazy” workflow that was nevertheless very attention-grabbing. That, combined with a fast pace of speaking and some sped-up audio, is the default means of presentation for many TikTokers. Dan Olson spoke in one of his videos about how he later undercut that aesthetic with a more visually pleasing effect by recording every script twice, once in a wide shot and once in a medium shot, then cutting between them rather than doing straight jump cuts or simply zooming in and out on the same footage. This process of aesthetic arising from necessity and later transcending that necessity to be reproduced for its own sake is a major way that social signifiers are created.

Another case of this is the “camera touch”. In Bobby Burns’ video titled “How to Emotionally Manipulate Your YouTube Audience”, he discusses the camera touch. It is essentially a way to appear authentic by harkening back to the days when many vloggers would post unedited videos which would include them reaching for the camera at the end to turn it off. This aesthetic is now used to make a video seem personal and off-the-cuff despite being scripted. And so another signifier gains social meaning and becomes a performative means of communication rather than a practical byproduct of the creation process.

Nowadays, creators hailed as “authentic” have sizable production teams behind them and decades of industry cultural to inform their presentation. They will eventually be overthrown by a New New Media in a process that will accelerate just like all other aspects of social encoding under capitalism.

This process is how capital inserts itself into production. None of these people are being told by harsh taskmasters to grab their cameras or cut their video a certain way, but they absolutely feel a subjective anxiety about losing their audience or about appearing in ways that will get them demonetized. And with these rather simple incentives, completely decontextualized social signifiers arise and are promoted due to their track record of enticing reliable consumers. Things as subtle as hand movements can be brought out of their context and given arbitrary, often subconscious, meaning. And because the process of finding creators who are effective at consolidating attention is largely automated, these signifiers evolve naturally over time to support the needs of capital.

If you have witnessed the corporate maturation of YouTube (ie if you remember a time when taking sponsors was still taboo), you have witnessed this cycle first hand. This means that your ability to process whatever signifiers you have learned has changed over time. This is the flip side of how consumer identities are formed, which I discussed in a prior post. I assert that the inability to ground social signifiers in material constraints is an integral part of how content creators are alienated from their own production and, by extension, how many forms of socialized production are alienating as well. A YouTube creator makes videos for the eyes of their audience because they fear the algorithm will not favor them if they stray from their brand. An Uber driver offers certain amenities or a certain attitude because they worry that poor ratings will lose them their ability to get rides. A server at a chain restaurant placates a rude customer out of worry that bad surveys will impact their ability to keep their job. These signifiers are all artificial and yet they serve to further squeeze productivity out of workers that has no relationship to how the worker feels about that production. And this whole process is accelerating.