The multicolored slurry of user generated content that for years has been successfully netting millions of kids’ eyeballs on YouTube by remixing popular cartoon characters to crudely act out keyword search scenarios leered into wider public view this week, after writer James Bridle penned a scathing Medium post arguing the content represents “a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives”.
What do you get if you endlessly recombine Spiderman and the Joker with Elsa from Frozen and lashings of product placement for junk food brands like McDonalds?
A lot of views on YouTube, clearly. And thus a very modern form of children’s ‘entertainment’ that can clearly only exist on a vast, quality-uncontrolled, essentially unregulated, algorithmically incentivized advertising platform with a very low barrier to entry for content creators, which judges the resulting UGC purely on whether it can lift itself out of the infinite supply of visual soup by getting views — and do so by being expert at pandering to populist childish cravings, the keyword search criteria that best express them and the algorithms that automatically rank the content.
This is effectively — if not yet literally — media programming by SEO-optimized robots.
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