Chapter 5: The Cancer of Content

This chapter provides a critique of YouTube and by extension TikTok that no one in intelligentsia has bothered to do. In this case, the context of YouTube’s detriment to the distribution of cinema and the artistic integrity of the visual arts. The chapter is the first to also provide a historical timeline to video streaming platforms such as YouTube, which also completely missing from the web critics’ assessment of video streaming platforms. The very early history of YouTube was remarkably different from what it is today in that budding filmmakers were able to achieve million-view success, especially in the form of socially critical documentaries. This marks a sharp contrast to the contemporary monetization of these platforms are usurping cinema with “content”: a video that serves the sole purpose of monetizing that is displayed in a similar context to how music is monetized on their streaming platforms. The chapter concludes that there is something more insidious about this “content” in that it often takes the from of a “vlog”, in which people put a camera on themselves to reveal anything they want to about themselves-effectively a from of surveillance.

Chapter 6: Camera of the Gods:

An extensive run-through of surveillance is provided before critiquing the contemporary state of surveillance in western culture. This includes many different facets of surveillance that academics seem to have overlooked. Ultimately, the chapter affirms Neil Postman’s contrast with “Orwellian” and “Huxlyan” approaches of dystopia in that Western countries take the “Huxlyan” approach. It is from this that the chapter exposes how cinema is being replaced not just by “content”, but a content that often takes the from of surveillance. Rather than an Orwellian “Big Brother” surveilling the public with brute force, the Western approach is to have surveillance as entertainment with surveillance woven into the fabric of the culture. The chapter concludes with affirming surveillance as a God-like power that the richest mortal humans incessantly want to acquire for themselves.