James Francis

I love watching YouTube videos. Some treat YouTube as a bottomless pit of distractions. But I like to find specific pieces of content, from in-depth talks about political systems to movie reviews to all-vinyl hip-hop mixes. Even the comments (yes, those infamous YouTube comments) can be pretty insightful.

We've gotten into the habit of blaming YouTube (and other algorithms) for corrupting us. Many blame the algorithm for the “bad” content they receive as if it's the instigator. But they are wrong. I know they are wrong because my YouTube algorithm is an idiot. It couldn't instigate an ice-cream riot among unsupervised toddlers. Despite having access to many years of my viewing data, it seems to have an active memory that varies between two months and two minutes.