The Baseline
For a while I thought YouTube would figure itself out. Everyone kept saying I didn’t understand the appeal, that I was being unfair to creators like ApeCrime, Bibi, Sami Slimani. They’d explain about authenticity, connection, how this is where the culture actually is now. And I thought: okay, maybe I’m just skeptical and out of touch. I can wait a couple of years. Let the kids get bored. Let the algorithm shift. Something will break the cycle.
But nothing broke. The same channels stayed on top. The pranks stayed obviously fake, the product placements stayed shameless, and the young audience just kept watching, thinking it was real, thinking it was authentic. Not because they’re dumb. Because they’ve literally never known anything else. This is what entertainment looks like to them. This is the standard.
I figured that out a while back, and it actually scared me. There’s no fixing that. You can’t teach someone they want better when better is just an abstract concept to them. An entire generation is going to grow up thinking that a certain kind of low-effort grift disguised as spontaneous real-ness is just… what art is. What connection is. What you aspire to.
My friends still find it funny—the ones my age, anyway, the ones who still wear Air Max and think this stuff is the future. And now they’re raising kids who are going to be even deeper in it, who won’t even have a memory of something different. Who won’t know what they’re missing.
So I stopped waiting for YouTube to correct itself. There’s nothing to correct anymore. It’s just the baseline now. And that genuinely unsettles me.