Bet on YouTube

Looking to 2025

If you’ve got a moment, please pre-order my new novel, Glass Century. It’s “spectacularly moving,” according to Junot Díaz. And it’s “about the only taboo kink left, adultery,” in the words of Nell Zink. I think you’ll like it. You can also get it on audiobook.

If you’re interested in reviewing, here’s the NetGalley link. (Only pre-order the hardcover. The paperback is incorrectly listed.)

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Over the past year, I’ve been a skeptic of various social media platforms and technological developments. I do not think artificial intelligence represents a revolution on the order of what came before us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not think Threads, BlueSky, or Elon Musk’s X can begin to approximate the cultural influence of 2010s Twitter. That era will never come back. Now more than ever, as the IT revolution winds down and innovation stalls out—Apple can do little but pump out new iPhones and Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is a historic flop—it’s a time to be wary of hype. Whether it’s cryptocurrency or ChatGPT, second-rate innovations are passed off as the equivalent of electrification or the introduction of the personal computer. As times goes on, tech moguls will only grow more desperate to hawk their wares to a wary public.

If there’s an exception to all of this, it’s YouTube. YouTube is not a great leap forward but it is, to an extent, vastly underrated by the cognoscenti. It is not shiny and new like TikTok and it doesn’t quite stick in the craw of the discourse like Spotify. It is not notorious. There was a panic, for a time, about the YouTube algorithm radicalizing the youth, but that has mostly passed. YouTube is simply there, and it’s booming. While Netflix is the subject of endless reportage and think pieces, YouTube is quietly the most popular streaming service in the United States. YouTube, within the decade, could be television, as more and more households cut their cable subscriptions. And if YouTube decided to get a little more ambitious, it could slowly bury Spotify. I am still the rare person who has a YouTube premium subscription but not one for Spotify. How do I listen to music without Spotify? It is strange to me more people aren’t aware that a YouTube premium subscription, which allows you to skip all the ads for $14 a month, permits you access to virtually every piece of music on Earth. I have been able to track down music on YouTube that I would not have been able to find on Spotify. With a user base north of two billion, uploads are near-infinite, and if you’re the type of fan who is perpetually on the hunt for deep cuts, grainy live footage, and other rarities, YouTube is the only place to be. All that seems to be holding YouTube back from crushing Spotify is marketing. One premium subscription can land you human civilization’s music library and the endless scroll of visual content. The podcast explosion is as much a YouTube story as a Spotify story. Joe Rogan is on YouTube, as is every other podcasting heavyweight. A podcast, these days, cannot be said to exist unless it has some kind of YouTube presence.

I don’t celebrate this state of affairs. It simply is—YouTube is a behemoth, and it’s only going to grow. Last January, I wrote about the clash between the microculture and the macroculture, and how decay in the latter was only going to embolden the former. Expect more of the same in 2025. The micro surges while the macro withers. Since Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris about seven weeks ago, CNN and MSNBC have seen their ratings evaporate. Fox News is strong, but they aren’t immortal. My own Substack has had the best seven-week stretch of its existence. I know I’m not alone. This is not a one-to-one relationship—a cable viewer disappears and ends up here—but it’s emblematic of where we are headed. There is great energy in the substratum that traditional institutions can’t quite figure out how to harness. They may never. I am nostalgic for what is lost, but this doesn’t blind me to the opportunities that are out there—for myself and for anyone else who wants to operate unmediated.

The only television show I’ve watched in the last four months with any regularity is HBO’s “The Penguin.” I don’t have cable and I don’t stream all that much. When I’m home, I read books, write, play my records—my vinyl collection swells with the Beach Boys and everything else—and head to YouTube. I’ll watch music videos, listen to music, dig up old baseball clips, and find random snatches of anime, politics, or whatever else falls into view. I’ll listen to bits of podcasts. My attention span skews heavily to reading: I find, when I’m home, I can read a print book for far longer than I can sit still to consume a TV show or movie. Perhaps, in addition to joy, there’s a feeling of amelioration that comes with literature because I am a writer and I do believe the only way to get better at writing is to read. So I read. And if I’m not reading or writing, I’m on YouTube. It’s easy. It’s there. It’s won.

Had the antitrust revival come along two decades sooner, it’s possible YouTube wouldn’t be underwriting the dominance of Google, now Alphabet. In 2006, Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, one of the great bargain buys in world history. Without YouTube, Google would have to sweat whether their A.I. investments would actually pan out and if Americans, weary of spam and slop, would slowly abandon their search for a competitor’s. However much the Google search decays, the company will be fine. They own the future of television, music, and radio. The same can be said of Meta, formerly Facebook. Most Americans under forty are fleeing Facebook in droves, and I don’t know anyone under thirty who earnestly uses the platform. The feed is impossible to tolerate for long, between the “reels” you never signed up for and the artificial idiocy. But Facebook has Instagram and WhatsApp—acquired for $1 billion and $19 billion respectively. If not quite the YouTube coup, they are close, especially WhatsApp, which has grown in dominance across the world. Meta and Alphabet are conglomerates that cannot be outcompeted any longer. This does fill me with despair, as well as the fact that we must perform so much of our online lives on their turf, like better-fed serfs. Still, there are undoubtedly many intriguing micro-communities on YouTube, and new forms of creativity taking root. I don’t dismiss any of it. If Hollywood and cable television and the streaming giants are getting slack, there’s plenty of insurgent energy below. Next year, more of it will burst into the open.