The New YouTube: Suburbia & Sleek Sabotage
“Attention, please beware that by entering this area you consent to be photographed, filmed or recorded,” reads a sign outside the four-story “Clout House,” in Los Angeles where Alissa Violet, a model and YouTuber, lives with nine other YouTubers. The Clout House’s rent is $34,900 per month and it is complete with ten bedrooms, fourteen bathrooms, a pool with a waterfall, sauna and steam room, theater, bar, nightclub, DJ table and gym. “It’s just CloutGang shit—I don’t even know how to explain it,” Alissa, who wears an oversized blue t-shirt, full face of makeup and layered chain necklaces, says to the camera as she gets in the elevator. Alissa then walks past the sleek granite countertops in the kitchen to the balcony patio. “I feel such, like, one of those weird bitches, like, oooh, look at how much richer I am than you,” Alissa laughs and tosses her hair over her shoulder. “But like we don’t even pay for this, it’s our company that pays for it—investors and all that.” On the balcony, there’s a huge white plastic bear, named Rufus, enjoying the 280-degree jetliner view, extending from downtown to the Pacific Ocean. Alissa says it’s overwhelming living in the Clout House. “I grew up in Ohio in, like, a small town,” she says. “But this is my life now.”
Alissa’s life seems to consist of modeling, hanging out with friends, making comedic videos and vlogging everything. She posts Instagram photos of herself in wrap dresses and shades on the Clout House balcony. She flies out to Milan for runway shows and she poses amid a staircase full of Louis Vuitton purses. She shows off her sense of humor in one YouTube video and orders delivery food, wipes make-up off half her face and then, when the delivery guy shows up, asks him if she looks good. She also documents everyday things, like her makeup routine, daily workouts and shenanigans, such as going shopping while cuffed to her friend’s wrist. And she vacations with her friends in Vegas and Coachella. “Hello, party people,” Alissa says in the Coachella vlog. “So, I didn’t even tell you guys that we got here by helicopter, it was so fun, I was, like, taking shots on the helicopter.” She collaborates with brands. “I’d like to give a quick thank-you to our sponsor for this video, the Real Real—an online luxury consignment app that sells some of my favorite designers at 90% off!” Her videos include clickbait, like, “it gets sexual” with a thumbnail of Alissa leaning in to kiss a female friend. “I’m a skinny legend!” she yells and strikes a pose in the mirror. “Jk, I need to work out.” And in nearly all her videos, she shakes her butt and grabs her breasts.
At my school, the University of Mississippi, two blonde sorority girls also document their lives on YouTube, with videos full of Lilly Pulitzer agendas, Starbucks Iced Caramel Lattes and plush pink pillows. When I first discovered these videos, I was amazed that these girls’ daily lives—making coffee, getting ready for class and hanging out in the dining room of their sorority house—could amass 20,000 views. Both of these girls also said they “collaborated” with brands, meaning they endorsed brands, and planned to pursue YouTube at least as a side-career. One girl even started her own brand of sunglasses, which she advertised on her Instagram, and was making a decent profit off it. While I was interviewing these girls, I wondered, how did YouTube, which was founded in 2005, go from the fever dream of absurd home-video comedy that I remember as a kid, to this glossy world of wealthy social media influencers in sleek condos and glittery houses?
In 2008, I was a bored fifth grader in suburban northeast Ohio who frequently crowded around a laptop with my brother and parents to watch two pink and purple unicorns, who sound like they’re on drugs, drag crabby Charlie the unicorn to “Candy Mountain,” where he eventually wakes up with without his kidney. We also watched fictional brace-faced Fred Figglehorn, who wore a witch’s hat on Halloween and spoke in a digitally altered helium voice, “My mom took me to our school counselor a few times, she said I have temper problems, but I DON’T!!!” And then, as I got a bit older, I’d watch “Overexposed,” in which a twenty-year-old guy who refers to himself as Kingsley, ranted about pop culture in front of his grainy webcam. “Bitch, where do I even begin with B.o.B’s new song,” he said. “Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? NO, we can’t, cause that’s fuckin’ stupid!” I watched Jenna Marbles—a blonde twenty-four-year-old go-go dancer, who uploaded her first fuzzy video in 2010, called“How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking.” Marbles satirizes girls who wear thick mascara, shove socks in their bras and wear so much makeup that they’re unrecognizable. Another classic Marble’s video is “How to Avoid Talking to People You Don’t Want To Talk To.” When creepy guys come grinding all up on you at the club, Marbles advises viewers to do “the face”—a double-chinned, repulsed, eyebrows-raised look—and don’t move. “I swear it’s the best thing I’ve ever come up with,” she said.
YouTube blew up instantly, becoming so popular that the Teen Choice Awards created a“Web Star” award in 2008, which has since expanded to a “Digital” category composed of ten types of web stars, such as Choice Comedy Web Star, Choice Fashion/Beauty Web Star and Choice Youtuber. A YouTuber is someone who creates and uploads videos for a living and can earn an accolade of awards, like the Gold Play Button, which signifies 10 million subscribers. Google predicts by 2025, half of viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay TV service. The world of YouTubers is a place of opportunity because anyone can grab a camera and start uploading videos of themselves and their everyday lives. It’s a world where an average girl from my suburban northeast Ohio high school can become a model, accumulate 3.8 million subscribers and move into a West Hollywood mansion in only a few years. Or at least, that’s the way it seems.
In high school, Alissa Butler, who worked at Panera Bread, posted on her Twitter and Instagram about her dreams of becoming a Victoria’s Secret Angel. I didn’t know her very well and we never even spoke in person, but we still followed each other on social media. Never give up on your dreams, she posted with a photo of fruit salad. She didn’t get very many likes. I thought she seemed nice, but from what I could tell, most people at my school didn’t like her.“Bro, why’d you invite her?” an upperclassman guy said to his friend while we were smoking hookah in his basement. “Alissa is so obnoxious.” Then, in May 2014, the day before Alissa graduated high school, she went to SouthPark Mall in Strongsville with her friend to shop for a commencement dress. There was a throng of middle school girls in the mall parking lot. “What the frick is this?” Alissa wondered. “Is Justin Bieber here or something?” She rolled her car window down and asked the girls what was going on. “The Viners Jake and Logan Paul are here,” the girls said. “They’re going to do a meet-and-greet!” Alissa was like, “who?”
Vine was a popular app that existed from 2013 to 2016 and allowed users to upload sixsecond-long, looping video clips. A lot of people did stupid pranks and uploaded them to Vine. I took of a video of my bikini-clad friend at the McDonald’s drive-thru ordering a vanilla ice cream cone and then rubbing it all over her body while blasting the Pussycat Dolls’ don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Other videos were just pointlessly funny, like my friend Jimmy asking his friend, “Hey Nate, how are those chicken strips?” Nate turned around and yelled in this obnoxious scratchy voice, “FUCK your chicken strips!” Jimmy and Nate’s 2014 video now has over 4 million views on YouTube, and when I told my college friends that I knew Nate, they exclaimed “you know the chicken strips guy?” And in 11th grade, at the Brunswick Old Fashioned Days, which was the summer carnival on our school’s blacktop parking lot, girls from other towns came up to Nate and said, “Oh my gosh! You’re the chicken strips guy!”
Vine has since been replaced by TikTok, and to me, these apps show just how boring it is to be a teenager in suburban America, perhaps especially in northeast Ohio. Because interestingly enough, the “kings” of Vine, brothers Jake and Logan Paul, are also from the Cleveland, Ohio area, which makes me wonder if the place where I grew up was actually a gold mine of debauchery, stupidity and superficiality. Logan is older than Jake by a year, but I always mix them up because they both have that iconic “bro” look—shaggy hair, hoodies and expressions that say,* I do what I want, and I don’t care.* Actually, to be fair, Logan promotes himself more as the “goofball” while Jake supposedly excels in stunts, pranks and video-editing. Logan’s early Vines include screaming when his iPhone accidentally fell in a sink of water, “Still refusing to accept it’s winter” and cannonballing into an icy lake, and texting and walking into a series of glass doors. “Girlfriends” also periodically appear in his Vines, like, “when she asks if you’re official” and Logan jumps out a second-story window, and “some guys just don’t get it on Valentine’s Day” when he looks past all the heart balloons, candies, teddy bears and grabs a box of condoms. Jake also appears in many of the Vines, like, “do what you want with my body” when Logan starts twisting Jake’s nipples, and “brothers stick together, literally” when they rub glue between their chests and walk through a grocery store. An online blogger wrote that Logan and Jake Paul “made dumb and dumber into reality.”
Yet, I couldn’t help but to laugh at these Vines because they represent the humor, albeit white, heteronormative, and often sexist humor, of my high school years. My friend once dropped her phone in a toilet, we sledded down snowy hills in our bikinis, and plenty of guys tried having sex with us without ever making our relationship “official.” The Pauls’ Vines make me nostalgic because Logan and Jake easily could’ve been guys at my school. I was born in ’96, the same year as Logan, and Jake was born in ’97. Logan and Jake grew up playing football and wrestling for Westlake High School. I grew up running cross country and playing lacrosse at Brunswick High School. While in high school, the Paul brothers downloaded Vine and competed to see who could make a better video. Within a week, one of Logan’s videos went viral and allegedly, they were already making more money than their parents. Logan then pursued a degree in Industrial Engineering at Ohio University, which is where many of my peers went to college, before quitting and moving to Los Angeles in 2014. Jake was training to be a Navy Seal before moving to LA in June 2014 to be with Logan and landing a role on Disney Channel in 2015.
To give you an idea of how reckless the Paul brothers were, Jake didn’t keep his LA address a secret, so, fans, mostly young girls and their moms, would crowd outside, snapping photos with their iPhones. Jake’s wild stunts and antics, including tossing furniture into an empty pool and setting it on fire, caught the attention of the local news. “Flames eventually grew higher than the house,” a neighbor said in an interview with KTLA5. Neighbors said Jake turned the street into a circus, to which Jake responded smugly, “Yeah, but people like going to circuses, right?” When pressed, Jake continued, “Yeah, I feel bad for them, but there’s nothing we can do, the Jake Paulers are the strongest army out there.” And in 2017, Logan Paul did a series of videos covering his vacation to Japan in which he and his friends wore Pokémon costumes and shoved raw fish and squid in the faces of people walking by. Logan then ventured into the Aokigahara Forest of Japan, sometimes referred to as the “suicide forest,” to find the body of a young man who appeared to have recently hanged himself. Logan didn’t turn the camera off and continued his antics, zooming in on the body and then showing his awestruck reaction. Before it was taken down, the video received 6.3 million views, the majority of which were probably children.
Before moving to LA, Jake and Logan did the meet-and-greet at SouthPark Mall in Strongsville, Ohio, which is where Alissa met them. Jake then “somehow” got his number into her phone and they became really good friends. “I guess he thought I was cute, I don’t know,” Alissa said in a YouTube video. The two talked and hung out for about six months, even after he moved to LA. Whenever he went back to Ohio to visit family, he and Alissa would hangout“non-stop” and then he was like, “Yo, why don’t you come out to LA?” So, Alissa flew out to LA for two weeks, Jake introduced her to modeling agencies, four out of five of which offered her contracts. Jake told her that if she moved to LA, he’d feature her in his Vines and help her get a following, make money. She briefly returned to Ohio before packing up her stuff, buying a car and moving out to LA in the summer of 2015. “I was head over heels for this kid,” Alissa said. “I would do anything for him, that’s why I signed a contract for five years.”
Alissa Butler started going by Alissa Violet and eventually moved in with Jake when he founded Team 10, a “unique incubator for aspiring social influencers.” Team 10 was meant to create “a home for talent to be developed, nurtured to perfection,” but teen magazine J-14 described it as a “social media fraternity.” Basically, Jake used $1 million to finance ten influencers to all live in an upscale house in an affluent West Hollywood neighborhood. They“collaborated to create content,” meaning they made Vine and YouTube videos together. Alissa wanted to be “official” with Jake, but he always brushed her aside, except when they were in front of the cameras. Jake discovered that fans loved him and Alissa together, so they pretended to date and sold #Jalissa t-shirts with cartoon versions of themselves kissing. And they made“couple” Vines together, like the “girl translator” in which Alissa yells, “I hate you, get away from me!” and Jake’s phone translates, “I love you, come hold me.” And “It was an awkward Easter,” in which Alissa gives birth to a stuffed bunny and Jake chases the Easter bunny away. Alissa also made her own Vines often involving public spectacle, like holding a pineapple up in a grocery store and yelling “Who lived in a pineapple under the sea?” And in another, she holds the camera up to the face of a cashier worker at a sex shop and asks, “does this dildo come in a bigger size?”
Then, Alissa Violet and Jake Pauls’ relationship got ugly, and in February 2017, Jake kicked Alissa out. Apparently, Jake would frequently ask Alissa to leave their shared bedroom for a few hours so he could hook up with other girls. He would tell Instagram models that Team 10 was “scouting for new talent” so they should come over and “see how it goes.” The models would come over, have sex with Jake, leave and never join Team 10. Alissa said that once, Jake even flew a girl from Ohio out to LA to have sex. It came out later that Alissa had gotten so “fed up” with Jake, that she hooked up with his brother, Logan. Fans, mostly young girls, responded cruelly toward Alissa, posting videos in which they disparage her. “Your face is so ugly,” one girl says. “You’re just trying to make Jake look bad.” After the whole fiasco, Alissa gained thirty pounds and said she felt used by Jake and Logan, like they never treated her as more than just the“hot girl” in their videos. “They’re always trying to one-up each other,” she said. “I was just a pawn in their game.”
Jake made many rules and restrictions in his Team 10 house. “If you’re not up by 10am you have to pay $50, and no alcohol at the house or you get fined $500,” Alissa said. “Every guest you had over had to be approved by Jake.” And apparently, all the checks for videos went through Team 10 first, so, Alissa was only given a sliver of the profits. When she asked why they didn’t split the money more fairly, she was told that she “couldn’t manage her own money.” Despite this mistreatment, Alissa said there was nothing she could do because it was Jake’s house, she had signed a contract and she couldn’t afford to leave. “I’m at where I am because of him,” she said. After Jake kicked Alissa out, Team 10 made a diss track rapping that Alissa was always “beggin’ for attention.” And they mocked her former workplace, saying, “Panera is your home.” In response, Logan Paul made a diss track called “The Fall of Jake Paul” in which Alissa appears. Logan raps, “Used to be your chick, now she in the Logang and you know she on my team.” Logan and Alissa kiss at the end of the video. Eventually, Alissa started dating another YouTuber, FaZe Banks, and joined FaZe’s CloutGang which was a rival group of Team 10. But recently, she discovered Banks naked in bed with another girl and the two broke up.
All of this repetitive petty drama is absolutely ridiculous, but that’s the point. The ridiculousness of YouTube, Vine and Instagram allowed Jake Paul and Alissa Violet to go from obscurity in northeast Ohio to LA fame in just a few years, without the help of conventional Hollywood handlers. “The Fall of Jake Paul” video has 247 million views and Forbes estimates Jake Paul’s net worth to be $20 million. Alissa Violet’s net worth is estimated at $8 million. Yet, most people above the age of twenty probably have never heard of either of them.
I only discovered Alissa’s fame in the summer of 2016, before starting college, because a guy from my high school tweeted, I don’t want to live in a world where Alissa Butler is famous. I had unfollowed her on social media since graduation, so I quickly looked her up and discovered she had moved to LA, had tons more followers, begun modeling and was hanging out with a bunch of tan bleach-blonde guys. At the time, I had never heard of Jake or Logan Paul, so I guess I wasn’t all that impressed. I just remember being happy for Alissa that she seemed to have accomplished her modeling dream. I followed her and over the next few years, I honestly enjoyed seeing her pouty golden hour poses on the skyline, her chunky white sneakers and jean skirt in London, her purple wig on Halloween, because I knew she came from my hometown, which I thought was cool, and because let’s face it, her photos are gorgeous and edgy. And I’m not going to lie, I was a bit jealous of her newfound success, even though I knew she only got where she was by allowing Jake Paul to demean her for months.
When I watch Alissa Violet’s YouTube videos, I feel a weird mixture of jealousy and pity, wonder and disgust at how YouTubers like her are able to lead such mindlessly indulgent lives every single day. I wonder how they can wake up every day and have no purpose other than getting more likes and “collabs.” The feeling I get when I watched Alissa’s videos—she and her friends splashing around in a pool, staring at themselves in the mirror, taking tequila shots on a yacht—was the same feeling I got when a vacation or weekend lasted just a little bit too long. Vacations when I began to understand, like Joan Didion wrote, that it is “distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” When my cousin yawned on the last night of our camping trip and said, “If I’m going to stay awake, I really need to get serious about drinking.” When I was playing drinking games with my college roommates on a Monday night and the jokes became stale and forced. When I woke up severely hungover at 4pm on a Saturday, quickly scarfed down a Big Mac, watched a rom-com and then wiped off the previous night’s makeup and started blotting my beauty blender over my face for another night out. When I day-drank on the Fourth of July—dolling myself up with fake eyelashes and spending hours with the same friends I see all the time, taking Snapchats and shot after shot. In all these situations, everything seemed to be at my disposal, yet there still seemed to be nothing to do, and I was desperate for anything to do, so I pretended to have fun, took a selfie and checked my phone for notifications, which, I bet, is exactly what Alissa is feeling and doing in her videos.
Alissa’s aesthetic reminds me a bit of Sav Montano, a social media influencer from Miami, whom my friend introduced to me in the summer of 2013, when I was 17. “Look at her, isn’t she just so cool? And beautiful?” my friend, Natasha, shoved her iPhone screen in my face. Sav, who was also seventeen at the time, stood in front of a mirror, wearing jean shorts, a flannel tied around her waist and a white T-shirt that exposed her belly button. Her long brunette hair was swept over one shoulder, her skin perfectly tan, and her bored facial expression was partially obscured by her iPhone. I thought she looked so effortless, and that the way she stood, legs shoulder-length apart, seemed so accidental, like oops, I didn’t even realize there’s a perfect gap between my thighs. Sav tweeted, “Infamous mirror pic,” and got over 12,000 favorites. Another photo featured red solo cups, 2 liters of Mountain Dew and bottles of Smirnoff vodka spilling off marble countertops. “Last night in a pic,” Sav tweeted. Natasha said we should have a party like that. “But . . . how?” I asked. “Whose house is that anyway and where are her parents?”
Sav’s photos were so natural, like she had just snapped a quick shot before returning to party with her friends, whereas in my and my friends’ photos, it was clear we had posed dozens of times and cared about how many likes we got. Sav was able to maintain that certain nonchalance, that sprezzatura of Renaissance courtiers. That’s the paradox, to carefully make it seem like you don’t care at all. And Sav’s profile was more than just sprezzatura selfies—her lifestyle, her BMW, her best friend kissing her cheek, her 4am trips to Denny’s reminded me of the Sims virtual reality game I played as a kid. That’s not to say her profile was perfect, but rather, it was perfectly imperfect. She was human. Her lifestyle was similar to mine, a 17-yearold girl who shops a lot, attends family barbeques and has a messy closet. Yet, Sav did this life so much better than I did. She made her “normal” life into something thousands of people wanted to follow, which to me, as a teenager, seemed like the pinnacle of success.
Sociologist Joshua Gamson writes that there are two types of celebrities: the “traditional” celeb becomes famous because of achievement, merit or talent, usually as a musician or actor, thus earning admiration and attention, while the “web star” becomes famous because they have been artificially produced for mass consumption by a team of investors, publicists, makeup artists and magazine publishers, usually through reality shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians. With the first, their elevated status is justified because they’re extraordinary, and with the second, their status is arbitrary because they’re just like us, only luckier, prettier and better marketed. “The celebrity industry certainly doesn’t need its celebrities to be extraordinary. What the celebrity industry does require of its humans is that they live, whether glamorously or not, for the camera,” Gamson writes. Film critic Neal Gabler also suggests that celebrities need narrative—what makes them successful is that each star in his or her own “life movie.”
Successful YouTube “life movies,” like that of Alissa Violet, blend the arrogance of Jake Paul, the zany humor of early Jenna Marbles, the sprezzatura of Instagram-chic models and the constant documentation and drama of reality TV. This formula creates a web star who fans believe to be more intimate, relatable and authentic than “traditional” celebrities. Through weekly or even daily videos, subscribers gain “backstage” access to the most personal aspects of a YouTuber’s life and are able to interact by leaving comments. A study of 13-to-18-year-olds found that teens appreciate YouTubers “candid sense of humor, lack of filters and risk-taking spirit,” which are behaviors that more conventional celebrities lack because they’re often“curbed by Hollywood handlers.” The ascent of the so-called ordinary celebrity reflects the normality of being watched every day. The shift toward the ordinary shows the heightened consciousness of our daily lives as public performances, Gamson writes. We expect that we’re being watched through the camera-lens on our laptops and we expect that we’re being listened to though the microphones on our Smart devices, so naturally, we’ve become more willing to offer up private parts of ourselves on YouTube to watchers known and unknown. Gamson writes that this trend suggests that the unwatched life is invalid, insufficient and even not worth living.
When I was interviewing an Ole Miss college YouTuber in Starbucks, a girl sitting nearby drinking a Strawberry Acai Refresher leaned over and asked me for the girl’s YouTube handle. I ended up chatting with this girl, Claire Boden, and she turned out to be an avid YouTube fan. “I watch YouTube whenever I’m bored,” she said. “About thirty minutes to an hour every day.” Boden said even though it’s sometimes hard to know who’s authentic or not, she ultimately enjoys YouTube because it’s interesting to learn about how other people think.“I’m just really interested in it, to like see a YouTuber’s side of everything, cause, they still have an everyday life, it’s just, like, they vlog everything.” Claire’s comment falls in line with the idea that YouTubers are just like us, but better at editing and packaging their lives, which suggests that we watch their videos to live vicariously. A recent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast argues that more of us are living vicariously through the people on our screens and in our headphones. Even though we’re not really living these other lives, watching feels close enough. “These other lives we’ve come to inhabit can seem more beautiful, more exciting, more satisfying than anything in our actual lives,” host Shankar Vedantam says. “They come in multiple camera angles with all the boring parts spliced out.”
When you grow up in a world inundated with people who splice out the boring parts of their lives, you learn to do the same. A recent survey found that today’s kids are three times more likely to aspire toward a career as a YouTuber than as an astronaut. My friend’s little sister, Sam, is one of these kids. When she was 9, she would strike poses and shake around to Icona Pop for her mom’s iPhone, propped precariously on a chair in the living room. Sam looked up to me and watched my favorite TV shows, like Gilmore Girls and Gossip Girl, which made me worry I wasn’t the best influence on her. When I went to college, Sam was disappointed I didn’t join a sorority. I tried telling her education is fun too, but I’m not sure she really listened. And since then, she started going by Sammie instead of Sam and made a YouTube channel with her friends called GAM Girls. I interviewed Sammie, now age 12, to try and understand YouTube’s impact on young girls, and she said when she grows up, she wants to be an actress. “But we also kinda wanna make our YouTube channel go viral,” she said casually. “And start, like, using it to get money and maybe make a job out of it.”
“Guys, we need more likes and subscribers . . .” Sammie’s friend Hannah says in their“Slime Challenge” YouTube video on their GAM Girls channel. “Yeah . . . cause we’re not getting anything,” Sammie says. “We have eighty-five views but, like, two likes, from us.”Sammie says. Her thick brown hair is on her shoulders. She speaks loudly over Hannah, “When you view these videos,” she says to her audience, which in this case was me, a 22-year-old, college student, “You are forced to like it too, okay? So, give me a thumbs up.” Out of pity, I immediately clicked on the subscribe and thumbs up buttons. I hoped that no one would walk by my desk in the library, see my screen and think I was some weirdo preying on young girls. “If you don’t like us, don’t watch us,” Jessica, the final member of GAM Girls pipes in as she unscrews the lid off a jug of glue. “We don’t listen to haters—we don’t have time for the haters,” Annie says. “If you don’t like it, give it a thumbs down, like, at least – we need something…” she trails off. “So that we can boost our way up.”
Sociologist Joshua Gamson points out that this “turn toward the ordinary” in celebrity culture does not represent a democratizing shift, meaning that even though it seems like everyone can easily become rich and famous from YouTube, that’s not the reality. “The internet drastically widens the pool of potential celebrities by lowering the entry barriers—a computer and a bit of moxie, and you’ve got a shot,” Gamson writes. But despite these changes, Gamson argues that the control center of celebrity culture has hardly shifted. Those with the capital are still the ones who determine the value of a celebrity. And those with the capital seem to be men.
“Silicon Valley is a male-dominated culture, some say a ‘frat boy’ culture, populated by‘brogammers’ and ‘tech bros,’” journalist Nancy Jo Sales writes. Sales asserts that some of the most popular social media apps used by girls reflect the tech industry’s frat house atmosphere, and I agree. YouTube seems to encourage young girls, like Sammie, to seek male approval. One of the GAM Girl videos depicts the three middle-school girls doing handstands, cartwheels and back-handsprings, while an older brother rates them. And in the case of Alissa Violet, she only became famous because Jack Paul, who had the $1 million in capital to finance Team 10, wanted to have sex with her, and because she was willing to essentially act as his puppet in exchange for fame. The Paul brothers undoubtedly shaped the new YouTuber industry to cater to an audience that either wants to be Jake Paul or wants to date Jake Paul.
“This generation of 2017—the Jake Paul, Logan Paul and this whole beef—showed the next generation of YouTubers how to act,” said Keemstar, a veteran YouTuber who’s been reporting on drama in the YouTube community since 2009. “Things have gotten so god damn ugly.” Keemstar said that it used to be shameful for YouTubers, who are making tons of money, to advertise their own merchandise in their videos and that such self-promotion would cause viewers to unsubscribe. But now, we have YouTubers like Alissa and Jake, who lie about being in a relationship in order to sell #Jalissa shirts. And with policies that require Team 10 *and *CloutGang members to consent to being photographed, filmed and recorded in their own houses, YouTubers now collect secret footage of each other to use as blackmail, which reminds me how, in high school, my friends and I secretly took horrible photos of each other and posted them on Twitter, laugh-cackling at the responses. Keemstar said YouTubers often ask him to expose secret recordings on his channel, but he refuses to do their dirty work. “We’re in a completely different world now, where selling out, being obnoxious and being a shitty person is rewarded,” Keemstar said. “It’s foreign territory that I’ve never seen before.”
In the past few years I’ve been thinking a lot about what the media we consume and produce says about us. What does it say that the most popular YouTubers are those who are sabotaging each other? What does our future look like if young people believe “success” is achieved by uploading footage of a dead man in Aokigahara? What does it mean that millions of young people perceive these YouTubers’ performances and product placements to be “real” and“authentic”? Maybe this fake, frivolous and dramatic entertainment is a reflexive reaction to our hyper-political world. Maybe kids and teens need a mindless break from worrying about all the challenges that the future holds for their generation. Maybe amid the chaos of the world—global pandemic, imminent environmental disaster and political divisiveness—we want to pause and take a moment to fawn over and escape into the luxurious and seemingly unaffected, apolitical worlds of Jake Paul and Alissa Violet. A world of pranks and fake-tanner, parties and recovery smoothies, diss tracks and hookups. A world like my 92% white suburban public high school, except, full of twenty-year-olds without college educations who are making millions of dollars and influencing millions of young lives.
After high school, I took a gap year to travel around the world, followed more Instacelebs and tried harder and harder to capture that sprezzatura, that perfectly imperfect lifestyle in my posts. I uploaded photos of chopsticks placed gingerly on a bowl of ramen, a surfboard leaned against a palm tree, and mirror selfies in boutiques in Copenhagen. I dreamt of becoming a web star, digital nomad and wrote a blog about my travels, One Blonde Around the World. But the more research I did into travel blogging, I realized the most successful bloggers had no depth, just beautiful images and advertisements. I realized I didn’t want to be another blonde woman on YouTube talking about the importance of hydrating your hair after a flight. Then I went to college and reflexively befriended a bunch of “misfits” who didn’t use social media or only uploaded a few times a year and I gradually grew out of that aspirational world of mirror bikini selfies, sabotage and glamorized normality. Some of my high school friends though, like Natasha, who first introduced me to the beachy world of Sav Montano, haven’t seemed to have moved on. Who dares me & Cam to have a bikini mud fight? my old friend, now 22 years old, posted on her Instagram story. If we get enough likes, we’ll do it.