The emergence of the video essay as a cultural phenomenon is more than just a quirky trend; it’s a symptom of the West’s broader failure to harness and cultivate its productive forces, a visible marker of our economies slowly unraveling. On a macro scale, it reveals a profound mismanagement of labor—watching as a generation’s potential is funneled into crafting endless hours of content, dissecting Shrek or analyzing video games, instead of engaging in work that builds or sustains society. In China, the youth are driven by the desire to contribute to tangible progress, to build, innovate, and drive their nation forward. But in America, the dream has curdled. We’ve settled into stagnant niches of pseudo-intellectualism, finding comfort in the shallow pursuit of online validation within a system that has long since given up on real advancement.

Our failure is glaring. We no longer even pretend that we can send our youth to universities to study subjects that matter—if they do manage to attend, we burden them with crippling debt, forcing them into absurd career paths where ad revenue from lengthy video essays becomes a lifeline. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that these pursuits have some intrinsic value, when in truth, they are little more than distractions in a society that no longer knows how to channel its workforce effectively. This should be a source of deep embarrassment—a nation once proud of its industrial might, now reduced to a hollow shell, its workforce chasing clicks and likes in the absence of real opportunity.

Capitalism, with its endless rhetoric of innovation and efficiency, has failed us. If capitalism truly optimized labor and resources as it claims, we would see the fruits of that efficiency in our infrastructure—in high-speed rail lines connecting cities like San Antonio and Austin, enhancing mobility and productivity. In China, such connections are not just ideas but realities, tangible proof of a system that recognizes the value of investing in its people and their ability to move, work, and create. But here, in the heart of the capitalist West, we languish. Our labor force is squandered on content creation that serves no purpose, producing nothing of real value, a testament to the unproductive reality of our so-called efficient system.

The irony is stark—capitalism, in its current form, is profoundly unproductive, a fact laid bare for anyone who takes a cursory glance at the vast ocean of content on YouTube. The platform itself is a monument to our collective failure, a digital wasteland where the intellectual potential of a generation is frittered away, not on building a better future, but on the futile pursuit of relevance in a world that no longer offers them a meaningful role. In this sense, the video essay is not just entertainment—it’s a quiet cry of despair, a reflection of a society that has lost its way, where the dreams of the young have been reduced to the pursuit of fleeting digital fame in a collapsing economy.

  • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
    ·
    13 days ago

    This imples an extremely narrow idea of productive labor which would be incompatible with the majority of entertainment given the significant amount of people who do actually consume said video essays because they are entertaining

    Edit: Ok I see what you mean but I also don't think it's particularly clear to describe it as a crisis of overproduction, even though that's probably correct idk I'm not that good at Marxist terminology. Personally I think it's due to an extremely large surplus army of labor. Plenty of jobs could exist and are actually needed but bourgeois business owners have no interest in spending any money on them. Plenty of them include people with the skill set needed for video essays (editing, writing, media criticism, design, confident speaking, philosophical analysis, and oftentimes straight up the creation of things video essays are often about, such as video games or books or TV shows or even more directly instrumental works like educational series or the design of tools and objects used in hobbies and even sometimes whole industries), but from a capital owner's perspective the employment of these people for these things is not worth as much as another marketing team or just another 20$ an hour in their pocket, especially when investors are involved.

    What you're left with is practically multiple generation's worth of humanities students, philosophers, social scientists, media critics, media designers and theorists, and other extremely important jobs, with absolute no way to make money from these passions as well as skills without turning to platforms such as YouTube which don't have a direct hiring process or strict employment limit. With the animator layoffs that have happened and all the shows that have been just outright cut out of streaming services I imagine this issue is just getting worse.

    So ultimately what we're witnessing is I think what you are saying, but the blame isn't at all on these "content creators" (usually). There is simply no use for what are otherwise socially essential forms of labor from the perspective of the capitalist. I actually think this is exactly what you were trying to say and, correct me if I'm wrong of course, I do think this is supported by how you specified that capitalist "efficiency" brought us to this point. So, it isn't just that capitalism is inefficient, but that when it is efficient it is to the detriment of genuinely essential forms of social labor, leaving said social laborers to either produce nothing and starve, or do the internet equivalent of really flashy begging backed up by their skills so they can get a bunch of people to act like the modern equivalent of a rich patron and fund their works they want to actually do. (The name of the platform people use, Patreon, actually makes this comically obvious)

    So I think where I disagree is the idea that people in the US don't want to contribute to society. I think they do. I don't think they are ever given the option to do so in a practical way or as a part of their labor. And this isn't just a humanities or social science thing, look at the entirety of "office work" and retail and all of these pointless ass jobs that exist because they need people to manage their jackoff financial shit. And all the genuinely important jobs (teaching, construction, other forms of physical labor) aren't treated as important as they are and I'm pretty sure aren't practically livable as a primary career for your average person, especially without business contacts to get into a higher paying position. So I don't think your average US worker can access productive forms of self-sustaining labor period. They have no opportunity to do so while also not starving.

    Even if you go into the trades you're basically at the mercy of whatever capitalists decide is useful and that's usually erecting the newest Mr Breast 200 Foot Tall Popsicle Stand

    • dukedevin [they/them, any]
      ·
      11 days ago

      What you're left with is practically multiple generation's worth of humanities students, philosophers, social scientists, media critics, media designers and theorists, and other extremely important jobs, with absolute no way to make money from these passions as well as skills without turning to platforms such as YouTube which don't have a direct hiring process or strict employment limit. With the animator layoffs that have happened and all the shows that have been just outright cut out of streaming services I imagine this issue is just getting worse.

      you said it better than me comrade