Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination
By Mark Bergen
Viking 2022

Mark Bergen, business journalist veteran of Ad Age, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, and everywhere else, is probably the world’s foremost expert on all things Google, which defaults to making him an expert on YouTube, since Google bought the video-streaming platform back in 2006. His new book, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination opens with a slow roll of the phenomenon’s starkly horrifying statistics: YouTube is the second most frequented site on Earth (after Google itself), the second most popular search engine (again, after Google), a site visited by nearly two billion people every day, and, most staggering of all, 450 hours of new video content is uploaded to the site every single hour. Readers who visit YouTube (even frequently) but never think about it will likely be taken aback by the sheer size of the site’s reach and impact. As Bergen puts it, “No company has done more to create the online attention economy we’re all living in today.” 

No mention of “online attention economy” can be anything but ominous, and although Bergen is anything but an alarmist, he’s written a very unsettling book, a vertiginous combination Wall Street and Terminator, a weird and often unpredictable (but never random) mixture of repulsive narcissists, tunnel-visioned code-nerds, soulless corporate profiteers, and, often sadly far in the distance, the single largest collection of ardently creative people in the history of the world. And undergirding all of it, something very close to an independent AI. As Bergen writes, “It’s the story of a new mass media programmed not by editors, artists, or educators but by algorithms.” 

YouTubers of all types and channel sizes talk about the notorious algorithm the way wandering desert tribes talked about their capricious whirlwind-gods. The stories abound: channels are promoted or buried or banned by metrics that are as inconsistent as they are inscrutable. Video creators are constantly guessing about the whims of this algorithm, and as you turn the pages in Bergen’s account, it’s impossible to avoid the impression that the mere humans involved in the process – even the ones behind the scenes at the company itself – aren’t entirely in control of what’s going on.

Certainly that would be an oddly comforting framing for a story with so many monsters in it. Bergen starts his account with descriptions of the mavericks who initially created the platform and watched it grow, and these and other company executives, especially Susan Wojcicki (chief executive since 2014) get plenty of attention from a reporter who’s studied their actions for a decade. The fact that so many of those actions are craven or stupidly swaggering seem of a piece with other corporate accounts, until the reader remembers that this particular corporation is changing entire societies. 

But as instrumental as those executives might be in effecting those changes, the real stars of a book about YouTube will be YouTubers – and their scandals. Bergen recounts the various horrible things done by Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, the most popular figure on the site, and this is only the first of many instances in the book where Bergen is curiously gentle, even slightly starstruck. YouTuber Philip DeFranco is called “a dogged vlogger with spiky hair and an Everyman vibe,” for instance, and Derek Muller, “a flourishing EduTuber whose channel, Veritasium, was known for unpacking dense topics,” is likewise described: “he had solid biceps and a neat black beard and looked like a comic Nick Kroll, only handsomer.” Even Logan Paul, the brainless, loathsome YouTuber who filmed a dead body in Japan’s Aokighahara “Suicide Forest” and uploaded the video accompanied by his own giggling, gets the Teen Beat treatment: “A former high school linebacker and wrestler, Logan Paul looked like a young Matthew McConaughey playing a beefy Disney prince.” 

In response to the furor his video caused, Paul issued a Patently Insincere Apology (PIA), saying “I promise to be better. I will be better.” And as Bergen tartly remarks:

He was. For a month. But then Paul piled onto a bizarre trend that had caught YouTube and social media flat-footed – a viral internet challenge to consume tiny, colorful Tide detergent pods. On Twitter, Paul joked about swallowing them. Later that week, in a YouTube video shot on a deck of his Los Angeles mansion, he zapped a dead rat with a Taser gun.

But YouTube didn’t boot him off their platform, because he makes YouTube a great deal of money, despite being an objectively vile public figure. The company didn’t boot PewDiePie off the platform, despite actions of his that would have had him fired from any other job on the planet, because he makes YouTube a great deal of money. The momentum always seems to be trending towards the obvious conclusion that YouTube is an evil company, a gigantic (and endlessly growing) parasitic growth on the underside of global society. 

Then the narrative swerves. “Actually,” Bergen writes, “YouTube was trying to improve its algorithms. Well, it always had. This was pure reflex. Software’s beauty was its elasticity, its ability to be forever refined and reprogrammed. Google constantly tweaked its products, even when they worked, especially when they worked.”

Like, Comment, Subscribe is the most sweeping, intelligent, and comprehensive study of YouTube ever written, the sure starting-point for all future such studies. And eventually, one of those studies will have to address just what it means for those algorithms to work. It might end up being important.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.