#132 - Top Video Essays 2023
or: free entertainment that's also somewhat educational
I’m a big YouTube person. (Been there since the beginning babeeeey you’ll still catch me at work tossing in a good “powerthirst” reference at work.) I know society at large is all about TikTok these days, but there’s something about listening to a random person spout off about their carefully researched and constructed topic for over an hour that still really gets me going.
The passion! The drive! The weird choices of what topics get communicated via mini-sketch in the middle of the video!
(Now, are there a bunch of copycats out there knocking off the 3-hour Jenny Nicholson recap of The Vampire Diaries / MikesMic’s Pretty Little Liars series? Yes, and most of them are terrible. Because a lot of people on YouTube just…aren’t that funny. And that’s fine but they’re trying desperately to copy a format that can only be pulled off if there’s consistent and original humor so it all just kind of falls apart. None of them made this list though, yay!)
Anyway! Here’s a list of videos I would recommend, and of course, they are accompanied by my non-patented “Is it fun to smoke to?” smoke show rating system. All videos are linked in the title and again at the bottom of the review. Okay! Let’s get it!
Dan Olson - This is Financial Advice
I feel I am owed financial compensation for the psychic damage I took in just from hearing the phrase “wife-changing money” BUT wowee-zowee this is an incredible video essay about what’s happened and is happening with the GameStop stock market kerfuffle.
The drama! The readouts of unparsable reddit diatribes! The incisive take downs of some of the most smug people on the internet!
Do I know what a short stock is after watching it 3x times? No! But I’ve like really tried to learn (Marty Scorsese even tried his best like a decade ago) and I think sometimes corruption tactics just don’t compute in my brain so, I’m gonna let myself off the hook with a “I understand it enough for my own purposes but please don’t ask me to explain it to you!”
His other essay on NFT’s and crypto is an all-timer most-watched for me as well. He makes this list a lot. I’ve been on this train since the Suicide Squad editing takedown and WOW has it hit some very interesting stations I wasn’t expecting.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (really good info, makes a serious topic entertaining, wish he hadn’t used a skit-format for explaining short stocks though I am a skit-hater through and through soz!)
Dan Olson - The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
Getting all my Dan Olson recs out right up top!
Again this is one of those “I know [The Metaverse evaluations] are fake but I don’t know the details or why it matters” essays. I loved it! I hate Mark Zuckerberg and I hate his and Peter Theil’s vision of the future because they really feel like they’re coming from a place of deep uncoolness and trying to fix their internalized self-hatred by creating products that those of us who like Being Humans And Not Robots aren’t all that interested in.
Want to know why those million dollar valuations for fake land in an online space kept happening? This video has all the answers!
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (incredible breadth and depth, I know too much about the online DOW voting aggregate systems, “The future is a dead mall” is one of the most haunting YouTube titles of all time! It is long but worth it!)
Jarvis Johnson - I Spent A Week Alone In The Metaverse
This is much more of a straight comedy and a perfect addendum to the Dan Olson essay. I laughed my ass off everytime I watched someone play basketball tbh, because VR is deeply silly and I refuse to not acknowledge that.
I don’t think there’s like incredible research on display but the insights are great! Plus I always like hearing someone unabashedly speak about how their social anxiety manifests in the world because I feel less alone.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (it turns out the only people consistently using this platform are literal children and…adult gamblers. Incredible platform you’ve built there, Mr. Zuckerberg sir, right up there in terms of iconography with your “I’m CEO bitch” business cards.)
Hbomberguy - Plagiarism and You(Tube)
This video has only been up for two weeks and has 11 million views. The fallout has been immense since it was posted because it turns out, stealing a huge chunk of your content from other queer content creators and scholars is uhhhh bad! But I think the video overall speaks to the churn-and-burn mindset that a lot of “creators” fall into when Content Is King and Morals Are For Mortals.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (the drama and fallout is really wild in terms of “real world impact” and while I do think this is…too long in many ways, it also doesn’t waste any of its time. It just has a lot to say about important topics and takes the appropriate amount of time to lay out the allegations.)
Watch the video here! (It is four hours long.)
Alice Cappelle - the instrumentalization of emotional labor
I really enjoy a lot of Alice’s videos, I always appreciate the way she frames her thoughts and the provocation her videos provide for me to think critically about the topics she covers. She’s also French and chic as hell and I find her videos very ~soothing overall.
While I wanted more of her thoughts about this topic, I also realized that I was just hoping she’d say my thoughts about emotional labor (and the co-opting of the phrase) but alas, looks like all my self-expression does, in fact, fall to me.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (whoooo we have to talk about customer service and productivity language being coopted for descriptions of interpersonal relationships WAY MORE OFTEN!)
CoffeeZilla - The END of Sam Bankman Fried
Oh baby if there’s one thing I love more than a tech scammer downfall it’s watching them draaaaag everyone down with them. I have not forgotten the celebrities who fell for FTX’s bullshit, nor have I ever dropped the angle that it absolutely was a key part of the Tom & Giselle divorce. Sam Bankman Fried has one of the funniest scammer names of all time and his complaints about his treatment in prison made some of the chucklefucks at the New York Times wonder “should prisoners be treated with human rights & dignity” which I’m sure was new for them so, he did some modicum of good in that one sense!
This video is particularly satisfying because while I’m not a huge fan of CoffeeZilla’s delivery methods, he has been doggedly pursuing this scam since way before traditional media reporters started paying attention to it. His essays taking down Logan Paul’s NFT scams are great too, really out here doing some good since our regulatory committees have fallen asleep at the wheel since ‘99.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5
ContraPoints - The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints
One of the more worrying aspects of the current culture we’re in is the lack of redemptive possibilities. So I get why ContraPoints originally spoke to the creator of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcast, who herself fought against the prejudices she had been indoctrinated into since birth from her family who led The Westboro Baptist Church.
I also think it’s very much worth noting that J.K. Rowling is far more dangerous than your average transphobe/TERF. She is not someone who just “has different opinions” she is someone who actively donates to anti-trans causes and legislators, who has billions of pounds and spends huge sums of it on making life harder for trans people, all because she’s worried about “feminism” or whatever transphobes tell themselves.
This video does a great job outlining a ~complex issue by breaking apart the layers to reveal the ways that framing victimhood propagates harm.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (brb, sending this video to everyone who still lists their Hogwarts House as a defining characteristic in their dating profiles)
NakeyJakey - The Age of Broken Video Games
Video games are one of THE topics I have the most thoughts on, and this video does an excellent job speaking to one of my main gripes about recent releases. Which is: they’re bad and unfinished and this form of game release is not going to be sustainable.
Don’t pre-order video games (literally ANY video games) 2k24! If a game requires a gig of patch updates on day one, it’s an unfinished game and should be called that! Also I hate needing internet connection for games and/or relying on having friends on the console to access the entire play through. Give me the full game on a physical disc or bust!
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (short, concise, informational, can be shown to people who don’t care about long form critiques of video game studios!)
Jenny Nicholson - Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn't & subsequent Patreon materials (soz but the tier is $2 so like, low investment/high yield)
Did this video come out in 2023? No! But it’s like five hours long and there have been three updates (two hours each) since. Did I expect to get so absorbed into this entire saga of a theme park that sounds like an absolute nightmare to me? No! But theme parks and America intersect in fascinating ways and this is also a story of entrepenurial grandiosity devolving into stupidity and workplace hazards very quickly.
And Jenny’s Patreon is literally $2 for one month so, if you like her stuff, there’s way more to be found over there, and the paywall means she’s a bit more candid about her reactions to some of the more egregious workplace safety issues.
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (Jenny breaks the scale, I have such a bias towards her videos, she is the only one on my “will always watch” list regardless of topic because she’s very funny and I enjoy her delivery and unabashed kindness!)
Defunctland - Defunctland: The Awful Wiggles Dark Ride (and FastPass, love the FastPass one so much! That word auto-capitalizes!)
Defunctland is all about theme parks, but The Wiggles ride was a fun way to chart the impact that group had on childrens culture and Australian theme park culture as well. There’s so much brilliant engineering that goes into inventing things like “trackless dark rides” and I am always fascinated by that.
Also, can’t get enough of his Fastpass video, which is THE video I’ve come to put on as background noise and that is weirdly one of the highest compliments I can pay a video essay. Also, I know so much about lines now! It’s one of those hunks of knowledge that has totally transformed the way I view a space’s setup and endlessly fascinates me!
Disney sucks but their company lore has me hooked! Read Disney Wars plz so I have more people to talk to about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s bizarre Diet Coke habits!
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5 (starting to realize putting rankings on a list of “best” is causing me to feel like these are artificially inflated but really it’s just that any 3-or-below wouldn’t be on this list!)
Watch The FastPass video here!
Other things I like to watch on YouTube that don’t fall into the video essays category:
WGA talks with Rachel Bloom & Aline Brosh-McKenna
Cozy desk setup videos & general work ambience vibes (this is a playlist!)
Okay well, hopefully you enjoy some of these (or all of them, even!) and got something out of this glimpse into my alt media consumption. Look, I’m not saying it’s flawless but if I had to keep one app subscription this year it would 100% be YouTube Premium. The luxury of not having ads or interruptions? Unbeatable!
Was this essay supposed to be sent out…last year. Yes! But that didn’t happen and I think this was my “circle back” final task so I’m completing it NOW!
Okay that’s it byeeee!
From The Vault:
Last Year - #79 - Don't Take Down Your Decorations, Please
Two Years Ago - #19 - Red Dead Redemption 2: A Three-Year Retrospective