#10: YouTube is a performatively self-aware political-economy

YouTube is a new kind of nation-state rooted in, and ruled by, self-aware performances about the rules and truths of its own conditions and practices. Like the internet it is built in and builds, it is a self-aware production about the conditions and experiences of social media labor, affect, ownership, and politics that also teeters on, and sits uncomfortably within, the true/fake divide.

Note to readers: With a heavy heart I link to this video. You need not watch it to understand its astounding connections to and revelations of the internet’s self-aware exposés of labor, politics, economics, the nation-state, and the truth/fiction divide. Its status as real and fake news is definitive of the medium, the message, and the man.

Further Reading on Performance and #100hardtruths-#fakenews:

• “Judith Butler and Performativity for Beginners (Mostly in her Own Words),” Irene Gustafson
• Learning from YouTube, Alexandra Juhasz
• Peggy Phelan. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 1993
• #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy