Inevitable Algorimages

The Necropolitical Infrastructure of YouTube’s Digital Dispositif

Leo Hansson Nilson

Department of Media Studies

Master’s Thesis 30 ECTS

Cinema Studies

Master’s Programme in Cinema Studies 30 ECTS

Spring 2019

Supervisor: Jan Olsson

Inevitable Algorimages

The Necropolitical Infrastructure of YouTube’s Digital Dispositif

Leo Hansson Nilson

Abstract

This thesis explores the relation between technology and the social, how they determine and naturalize

each other, by examining YouTube’s socio-technical infrastructure. YouTube is theorized as a

dispositif that produces regimes of knowledge, power and subjectification within “control societies”

characterized by an informational mode of production. Utilizing a media archaeological and

materialist, critical theoretical approach, I analyze YouTube’s database, interface, users, algorithms

and protocols alongside economic factors, media, advertising and intellectual property laws, as

technical and social forces of production in which power relations arise.

I find that YouTube incites users to make themselves visible through information inputs, processed by

database algorithms to produce outputs as inevitable representations of user actions. On the interface,

this is translated as a sequence of algorimages, defined by what is “up next”, in accordance with an

information and “attention economy” extracting revenue by capturing and commodifying users’

attention into hierarchies of value. I conclude that algorimages, whether of cats or political violence,

are made homogeneous by the execution of an algorithmic command of continual update, propagating

them through their destruction as necropower in a necropolitical regime of visibility, producing

YouTube as an “ecology of finitude” and control societies as an inevitable, “third nature”.

Keywords

YouTube, dispositif, control, power, archive, subjectification, algorithms, database, interface,

necropolitics, infrastructure, mode of production, protocol, capitalism, machines, spectacle

Contents

1. Introduction ....................................................................................... 1

1.1 Previous Research ............................................................................. 2

1.2 Research Questions and Aims .............................................................. 4

2. Methods and Materials ........................................................................ 6

2.1 Media Archaeology/Genealogy ............................................................. 6

2.2 Materialist Media Theory ..................................................................... 6

3. Theoretical Framework: The Social, Technical and Machinic ................ 8

3.1 Control ............................................................................................. 8

3.2 Protocol.......................................................................................... 10

3.3 The Digital ...................................................................................... 12

3.4 The Derivative Dispositif ................................................................... 12

3.5 The Machinic and the Mechanical ....................................................... 16

4. YouTube's Archive Architecture: Database, Storage, Knowledge ....... 18

4.1 Database as Storage and Sequence ................................................... 18

4.2 Modulate, Relate: The Spatiality of Control .......................................... 21

4.3 An Archive of Attention..................................................................... 23

4.4 Hard-Drive, Death-Drive ................................................................... 28

5. An Ecology of Finitude: Interface, Transmission, Power .................... 32

5.1 Interfacing Mediation and Representation ........................................... 32

5.2 Transmitting Transparency: Visibility is an Ad ...................................... 35

5.3 Vectoral Forces and Relations in the Informational Mode of Production .... 38

5.4 Third Nature.zip / Second Nature.mov / Nature.jpg .............................. 41

5.5 cmd.exe:// Possible > Probable > Inevitable ....................................... 43

5.6 The Inevitable-Image ....................................................................... 45

5.7 Matters of Life and Death.................................................................. 49

6. YouTube is YOU Too: User, Processing, Subjectification .................... 55

6.1 User-Subject-Machine ...................................................................... 55

6.2 Machinic Surplus Between 0 and 1 ..................................................... 58

6.3 Dividual Divides into YOU ................................................................. 60

6.4 Common-ication: From YOU to MultiTube? .......................................... 64

7. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 68

Bibliography ......................................................................................... 71

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1. Introduction

YouTube was launched in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, with the help of 11.5

million dollars in start-up funds from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, as a video sharing

site that featured a single video of one of the company co-founders documenting his visit to

the zoo. Within months the website was amassing millions of visitors and views daily, and

tens of thousands of uploaded videos of everything from home movies, scenes from rare

films, newly released music, to the day’s top news stories. This steadily growing user base

was quickly recognized as a major financial opportunity by Google which, only a little over a

year after YouTube’s inception, acquired the company for a sum of 1.6 billion dollars.1 Since

then, YouTube has become, as of February 2019, the second most-visited website on the

Internet and the most popular place for the streaming of arts and entertainment.2 What was

once a novel technology, a “new media” full of exciting prospects for emergent aesthetic,

cultural and even political practices, has become simply media, a standardized form so

ubiquitous that it becomes harder to envisage a time without the possibility of documenting

the drama of everyday, contemporary life for everyone with a Wi-Fi connection to see.

YouTube has effectively become natural.

This thesis is concerned with analyzing the effects of this naturalization. How is it that

the platform heralded as a democratizing force based on sharing and interaction is such a

hotbed of personalization and reaction, overflowing with its own celebrity content creators,

conspiracy theories, neo-fascists, scene upon scene of social and environmental devastation

alongside the most banal, viral videos of cats and half-hour single shots of people playing

computer games? We are interested in investigating the implications of this environment and

the forces that compose it, at the levels of both a technical and a social infrastructure.

1 Megan Rose Dickey, “The 22 Key Turning Points in the History of YouTube,” Business Insider, accessed May

22, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/key-turning-points-history-of-youtube-2013-

2?r=US&IR=T#youtube-launched-its-partner-program-to-let-people-get-paid-for-their-viral-content-in-may-

2007-8 2 Alexa, “The Top 500 Sites on the Web,” accessed May 22, 2019. https://www.alexa.com/topsites;

“youtube.com”; Similar Web, “youtube.com,” accessed May 22, 2019.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com.

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1.1 Previous Research

In the edited volumes The YouTube Reader and Video Vortex Reader volumes I and II,

YouTube is analyzed as an aesthetic, political, economic and technological object by a

disciplinarily diverse set of perspectives. One of the most prominent trends in these analyses

of YouTube concern its status as a mode of participatory culture by emphasizing user

practices. Scholars such as Henry Jenkins have extensively explored how YouTube’s

amalgam of mediatic forms allows it to foster the coupling of spectator with the producer in

the category of the “user” as it (seemingly) allows anyone to access and upload content.

Whether amateurs or professionals, kids or corporations et al., YouTube is constructed

through user engagement with videos through liking, sharing and commenting on them, or

even sampling them to create new “remixed” content. The notion is that YouTube harbors the

possibility of promoting the democratization of the internet by proliferating alternatives to

consumer culture via these “grassroots”, participatory means of social networking and

community building.3

This also informs another major strand of YouTube research, namely, as a “new

media” that finds its novelty in repurposing or remediating of older mediatic technologies,

whether film and TV, music, video games and even writing, together in the same digitized

medium. A large portion deals with aesthetics and the aforementioned forms of remixing and

sampling, mashing up formal traits of film and television with home video qualities, or the

eschewing of narrative for the spectacle of the clip, evoking what Tom Gunning has referred

to as the “cinema of attractions”.4 Others, have been interested in how YouTube provides

people with the possibility of documenting and distributing self-representations, such as

Katherin Peters and Andrea Seier’s examination of homemade dancing videos in relation to

questions of the self, the body and media technologies.5 This thesis is not particularly

concerned, however, with such questions of aesthetics or user practices of self-representation.

On the other hand, Jean Burgees and Joshua Green, have argued that while YouTube

and the spectator-users have upset any traditional distinction between the amateur and

3 Henry Jenkins, “Nine Propositions Toward a Cultural Theory of YouTube,” Henry Jenkins, accessed May 22

2019. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html. 4 Joost Broeren, “Digital Attractions: Reloading Early Cinema in Online Video Collections”, in The YouTube

Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009). 154-163. See

also: Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle,

8, nos. 3 & 4 (Fall, 1986): 63-70. 5 Katherin Peters and Andrea Seier, “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube” in The

YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009). 187-

201.

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professional, their separation is not so clear cut. A significant amount of the most popular

content is created not by amateur users but by major media companies, such as Universal

Music Group, and smaller semi-professional productions like web-TV channels. These

seemingly different content producers are alike in their aesthetic presentation, most notably in

the “vlog” form where individuals ranging from average, DIY-users, to sponsored

entrepreneurs, upload personal video blogs. As such, YouTube is dynamically “co-created”

by these twin poles.6 This dynamic is also the basis of many articles that tackle YouTube’s

position in regard to a contemporary “online economy” and larger shifts in the culture

industry. Most of these tend to address problems regarding the conditions under which

copyrighted content may circulate. Paul MacDonald, for instance, has investigated how the

user remixing and sharing of unlicensed content often results in discords between the media

conglomerates who own this content, user communities and YouTube’s ad-revenue system.7

It is this aspect of participatory culture that is relevant for this thesis insofar as it deals with

the forces and relations constituted by these content cleavages.

Then there are investigations of YouTube’s technological specificities, whether

concerning its multiple interfacial frames and windows, how videos circulate through search

and stream, or how information is collected in its database. Scholars like Andreas Treske,

Sabine Niederer and Trond Lundemo have analyzed the technical parameters that affect the

form YouTube videos take in terms of editing techniques, image granularity, upload

requirements, or the consequences of digitization for accessing older media and analog

images alongside native “digital” content.8 There is also a considerable debate around whether

or not YouTube’s database can be called an archive or might better be labelled a collection, a

cloud, a library or museum, something which we will return to later in our analysis.9

In recent years there has been a surge of interest, both popular and academic, in the

political implications of social media networks such as Google, Facebook or YouTube. Often,

this is articulated in terms of the collapse of the public and private through “Big Data” mining

6 Jean Burgees and Joshua Green, “The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-

Amateur Divide”, in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library

of Sweden, 2009). 89-108. 7 Paul MacDonald, “Digital Discords in the Online Media Economy: Advertising versus Content versus

Copyright”, in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of

Sweden, 2009) 387-403. 8 Andreas Treske, “Detailing and Pointing” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink

and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008); Trond Lundemo, “In the Kingdom of

Shadows: Cinematic Movement and Its Digital Ghost”, in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick

Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 314-327. 9 Rick Prelinger, “The Appearance of Archives”, in The YouTube Reader ed. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau

(Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009). 268-257.

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of personal information by State and corporate surveillance entities, or the advent of “fake

news”, such as AI bots disseminating deliberately false content and the bias of algorithmic

“filter bubbles”.10 Zeynep Tufekci, for instance, has called YouTube “the great radicalizer”

referring to the way in which its algorithms don't just simply recommend videos based on

what you have seen before, but increasingly promote videos that more extreme in their

views.11 The issue at hand in this thesis is not what political viewpoints YouTube spreads, or

simply political forces imposed on it from the exterior, but how the spread works in the first

place. What interests us here are the immanent social and technical conditions that make

YouTube a political technology.

1.2 Research Questions and Aims While the studies we have briefly surveyed have contributed vital insights into YouTube as an

emergent mediatic form, some of which we will return to later, what often is missing in them

is an account of power. This is not to say that this issue does not appear at all, but rather that

they tend to be limited to seeing YouTube simply as an expression, or tracing, of

contemporary capitalist ideology, “neoliberal” or otherwise, rather than mapping and

examining what effects and relations of power YouTube itself produces. We are particularly

interested in not isolating or reducing YouTube’s novel and distinct technics, such as its mode

of storage, image circulation, user practices etc., to simply effects on YouTube but extending

these to the larger mediatic, socio-economic infrastructure that YouTube is both situated in

and saturates.

It is crucial to state already here that these elements are not to be treated separately,

but rather as intertwined and mutually determining. YouTube’s particular technical

functioning structures not only the user experience of the platform but also lived experience

away from the screen. Accordingly, this thesis aims to analyze YouTube not simply as a

popular video-streaming website, but as a dispositif, a social and technical machinic network

of parts within the historical-social formation, the diagram, of control societies and an

informational mode of production, in order to understand the conditions that make YouTube a

political technology and a matter of power:

10 Mark Andrejevic and Kelly Gates, “Big Data Surveillance: Introduction,” Surveillance & Society, 12, no. 2,

2014: 185-196, accessed May 22, 2019, doi: https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.5242; Eli Pariser, The Filter

Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011). 47-76. 11 Zeynep Tufekci, “The Great Radicalizer,” New York Times, March 10, 2018, Opinion, accessed May 22, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html?smid=pl-share.

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- What are the social and technical components, i.e. the databases, images, users, algorithms,

intellectual property, corporations, et al., that compose YouTube’s machinery? What are the

forces and relations of production immanent to this platform infrastructure?

- What are the effects of YouTube’s functionality and what regimes of knowledge, power and

subjectification are produced by it in turn? How can examining YouTube’s machinery help us

understand the larger social infrastructure of control in which it both is situated and

participates?

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2. Methods and Materials

2.1 Media Archaeology/Genealogy This thesis conceives of YouTube as a technology that is not simply meant for sharing and

streaming videos but as a technical, social and political machine. Far from simply being an

interface that immaterially appears when we type its domain name into a browser or search

engine, for YouTube to function it must have a material substrate. That is, YouTube requires

a physical hardware media device, such as a computer, tablet, smartphone etc., composed of

fiber optics, signal processors, servers, etc., in order to be accessed in the first place, but also a

software level of databases, algorithms and protocols that generates the interfacial appearance

of YouTube. Thus, to accurately assess YouTube as a technology we must have an

understanding of the material, technical operations. Taking the stance that one must

understand how the thing works in order to critique it, this thesis adopts a certain strand of

media archaeology, that seeks to excavate the material levels of the machine that serve as the

conditions of possibility for YouTube’s effects. As Jussi Parikka has stated, such

archaeologies stress the layered algorithmic processes in which contemporary media are

embedded in “the technological sense of conditioning the way they attract, and act as conduits

of power, governance, economy and relations between humans and non-humans.”12

However, solely focusing on technical aspects runs the risk of a technological

determinism. The incessant insistence on the device, as Parikka elaborates, while highlighting

technics of perception and sensation can also disavow the dimensions of power/knowledge

and subjectification embedded within these technologies, which in turn can aid

archaeologies/genealogies of contemporary capital.13

2.2 Materialist Media Theory This also points to another, equally important sense in which YouTube is material, that is, its

technology is not simply the result of the ideas and innovations of three former PayPal

employees, but is embedded within a social infrastructure. As Marx put it:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are

12 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 38-39. 13 Ibid., 133.

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independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the

development of their material forces of production [...] The mode of production of material life

conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.14

Marx describes “infrastructure” as society’s economic base “on which arises a legal and

politcal superstructure”. 15 However, informational technologies increasingly blur the

distinctions between the two, so we will expand “infrastructure” to encompass the technical,

which implicates mediatic, cultural and juridical factors. As such, this media archaeological

approach will be supplemented with a materialist, critical media theory to examine how the

contemporary mode of production is enmeshed within YouTube's platform infrastructure.

Technology and the social are not separate, but following McKenzie Wark, “[o]ne is simply

looking at the same systems through different lenses when one speaks of the political or the

technical.”16 Thus, how can we understand YouTube’s technics as forces of production, not

just for functionality of the website, but in the social, and what relations arise in conjunction?

Yet, YouTube is also a technology of the image. As stated above, what is of primary

interest is not specific content, nor particular stylistic techniques, shots, narratives, editing, of

any given video, but of its form insofar as it is an assemblage of processes that include:

streaming, searching, storing, clicking, databases, algorithms, protocols, users and the social.

However, what is of note in regard to content is the way in which this machine privileges the

circulation of certain forms.

14 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress

Publishers, 1999), accessed May 22, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-

economy/preface.htm 15 Ibid.

16 McKenzie Wark, “#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Speculative Heresy,

accessed May 22, 2019. https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/wark-mckenzie-celerity.pdf

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3. Theoretical Framework: The

Social, Technical and Machinic

We have said that we are analyzing YouTube as a socio-technical machine, so here we might

want to explicate what we mean by these three terms: the social, the technical and the

machine. In his book on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze stresses that “[t]echnology is social before it

is technical.”17 While it is imperative that these technologies also exert their functions

throughout the social field, “in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines

have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages.”18 The technical and

social are what Deleuze designates as “concrete machines” and “abstract machines”,

respectively, so named because the former is actualization of the latter’s virtual diagram, or

map of power relations. The former makes the latter possible and realizes it only to the extent

that the latter was already its presupposed possibility, its immanent cause.19 In other words,

technology does not spontaneously spring from nothing, nor is it simply a matter of

innovation or progress, but emerges out of social processes that determine “at a given

moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.”20 So, if our aim is to understand

the specificities of YouTube’s machinery, what social and technical techniques and

subsequent effects it instantiates, we must first situate within a diagram that has selected it.

3.1 Control

In one of his final published texts, Deleuze provided a brief, but highly influential,

periodization of contemporary society. Following Foucault, Deleuze saw that just as

disciplinary societies took over from the societies of the sovereign around the 18th century,

discipline was beginning to shift into societies of control. Where discipline operated through

the hierarchized logics of spatial enclosure and temporal optimization through surveillance

and examination in institutions with their own laws or standardizations (the primary exemple

being the panoptic prison), control dissolves these borders by rendering them porous and

interwoven. As Deleuze succinctly states, “[e]nclosures are molds, distinct castings, but

17 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 41. 18 Ibid., 40. 19 Ibid., 39-41. 20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) 397-398.

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controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will change form one moment to the

other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”21 For instance, the

factory has been replaced by the corporation, which dispenses salaries no longer according to

the axiom of maximum productivity/lowest possible wages, but through a metastable state of

motivation and competition that incites workers to compete with others, and themselves, in

order to merit “bonuses” and other benefits. The same variability goes for education, which

does not cease at graduation or the passing of examinations but becomes a dispersed site of

“perpetual training” where “development” always implies a subsequent stage. These

institutions have become entangled, as what is this training if not constant proof of merit; one

is a student at work, and a worker in school.22

The people caught oscillating between these flexible institutions also become

modulations. Discipline created the discrete individual by documenting and registering people

as individual “cases” that could be differentiated from the “mass” within a hierarchized field

of comparison and against a rule of optimization and normalization.23 In control societies, this

common field is not comprised of archival records communicating analogically but is defined

by the numerical language of code in which information about people, places and things, and

the interactions between them, are stored and addressed. As such, defined by these codes,

people become not individuals, but dividuals that can be spliced and sampled into different

networks of information, effectively rendering the masses into pure data, or databanks.24

Control emerges in Deleuze's diagnosis in accordance with a “mutation” in capitalism defined

primarily by the decoupling of the dollar to “the gold standard” ushering in floating rates of

exchange, capital’s outsourcing of production to the Third World and increased selling of

services, as well a general, ubiquitous corporatization.25

In this respect, it largely corresponds to the myriad periodizations of the socio-

economic shift in the latter of half of the 20th century with regard to capitalism’s mode of

production. While this contemporary paradigm has been given several different

denominations (neoliberalism, post-Fordism, cognitive capitalism, late capitalism etc.) what is

generally agreed upon is that information has become the primary force in economic

production. This is what Hardt & Negri describe as the informatization of the economy

21 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59, (Winter, 1992): 4. 22 Ibid., 4-5. 23 Michel Focault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin

Books, 1991. 183; 189-191. 24 “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” 5. 25 Ibid.

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wherein production is no longer concentrated into centralized location but is dispersed into

global networks of productive sites that can cooperate and communicate in spite of distance.

Industry and factory jobs have been increasingly replaced by the diffuse sphere of services

characterized by the production and distribution of information, knowledge, affect and

communication.26 For Hardt & Negri this has engendered the emergence of a new form of

sovereignty termed “empire”, which is explicitly linked to Deleuze’s analysis of control since

it “smooths over the striae of national boundaries” in “the realization of the world market and

the real subsumption of global society under capital”.27 This realization, it must be stressed, is

fundamentally a result of advancements in telecommunications and computational

technologies, something which Deleuze also hints at by claiming that the machine that

belongs to the order of control is that of the computer as it can “express the social forms

capable of generating and using them.”28

3.2 Protocol

As media theorist Alexander R. Galloway has explicated, computers do not merely express,

but affect these social forms. The spatial logic of control societies is the landscape of the

distributed network. It is neither centralized, where there is a single point from which

commands are issued, nor is it decentralized so that there are several central hubs each with

their own nodal connections, for within both of these networks, communication is

unidirectional. A distributed network is rather omnidirectional, since every point is equivocal

and can communicate directly with each other.29 Yet, what allows them to establish

connection is their shared language, or what in computer programming is known as protocol.

Protocol, Galloway explains, is the way in which control manages to exist within the

openness of the distributed network, for they are the “pre-agreed scientific rules” of the

system according to which the autonomous network nodes operate.30 As such, Galloway

states that if one considers Hardt & Negri´s “empire” the social theory of this historical

period, then “protocol” is the technical one.31

26 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 285. 27 Ibid., 332. 28 “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. 4. 29 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2006), 11-12. 30 Ibid., 5; 38. 31 Ibid., 26.

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The most prominent distributed network is the Internet, which quite simply is a series of

networks interconnected through computers, or “gateways”, that transmit information

between one and other using specific protocols. Protocols functions through layers. For

instance, TCP/IP, the Internet’s standard transmission protocol, divides its communication

into four parts: an application layer that provides and preserves the content of the data being

transferred, a transport layer that simply makes sure the data gets from point A to point B

intact and confirms the connection needed for the application to take place, an internet layer

whose sole responsibility is the raw act of sending data, and a link layer of hardware that

serves as the material substrate through which data flows.32 However, the particularly

noteworthy aspect of the Internet is that it is not merely composed of distributed protocols. Its

appearance, its function as an interface between machines and users, is governed by

decentralized protocols, primarily DNS, HTTP and HTML. DNS renders the mass of 0s and

1s into readable, and writable, domain names that allow us to access websites without having

to memorize a monotonous myriad of numbers, while HTTP and HTML are that which give

websites their ability to appear as images and fonts rather blobs of text and code.33 Thus, the

central conclusion to be drawn from this is that far from being a radically open and free space,

the Internet is caught in the paradoxical throngs of two protocological tendencies, one of

radical distribution and reactionary decentralization.34

These protocols are not arbitrarily deployed, for the most part if they are in use this is

because they have been standardized. While not mandatory, their adoption by industry is,

nevertheless, crucial because technical standards almost always win out on the basis of free

exchange and debate.35 These standards are set by various committees of technocratic

computer scientists and so, “protocol is a type of controlling logic that operates outside

institutional, governmental, and corporate power, although it has important ties to all

three.”36 This entanglement of various controlling forces and the dialectic between openness

and control, will become increasingly clear and relevant in the analysis of YouTube’s

infrastructure.

32 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 39-47. 33 Ibid., 47-52. 34 Ibid., 50; 142. 35 Ibid., 126. 36 Ibid., 122-124.

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3.3 The Digital

What is common to both the social and technical formations of control, empire and protocol

is, precisely, commonality, or the reduction of subjects and objects to representations of the

same process by virtue of a shared language. Galloway has elaborated how Deleuze's

characterization of control's language as numerical, as opposed to analogical, should be

reformulated as digital. Digitality, as defined by Galloway, via Deleuze, is a process that

consists of five equivocal terms:

Binarisation, the grouping of things into twos, is the same as digitisation, the separating or making

distinct of things, is the same as integration, the solving of complex function curves, is the same as

codification, the representation within a symbolic system, is the same as homogenisation, the making

uniform of dissimilar ingredients.37

The digital is thus the reduction of heterogeneous elements into a homogeneous relation,

wherein distinct things are expressed through the same executive language. The analog may

also share “a common language”, however, it is based on the differentiation between these

terms rather than their identity.38 The universal, protocological language of computers

Galloway identifies is also discussed by Hardt & Negri in relation to the homogenization of

labor, or its full transformation into what Marx called “abstract labor”, meaning the general

capacity of labor power. Where in previous historical formations different tools corresponded

to different tasks, the computer has made it so that an increasingly diverse amount of tasks

may pass through it as the totalizing tool.39 We will reserve further exploration of what social

effects this technical digitality has in our analysis and focus now instead on how digitization

enables machines to actualize the diagram of control.

3.4 The Derivative Dispositif

So far, we have discussed the abstract machine, or diagram, of control that is the

virtual map of power relations within the contemporary mode of production. This can only act

as a cause, however, by taking effect, and for this there must be concrete machines that

execute its relations, what Deleuze and Foucault designate as the dispositif. 40 Cause and

effect are mutually presupposed and as such, the diagram should not be understood as a

37 Alexander R. Galloway “Computers and the Superfold,” Deleuze Studies, 6. issue 4, (2012): 519. 38 Ibid. 39 Hardt & Negri, 292. 40 Foucault, 36-37.

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transcendental function that acts from above but is rather immanent to itself and the effects

actualized by dispositifs.41

The term “dispositif” starts to appear in Foucault's work around 1975 after he

ostensibly completed his genealogy of disciplinary societies and begins to map the emergence

of biopolitics/biopower and governmentality. In his lectures and texts from this time Foucault

never explicitly defines the dispositif, however, in an interview from 1977 he offers a brief

description:

What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set

consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative

measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions-in short, the said

as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositif. The dispositif it­self is the network that

can be established between these elements…42

This definition while concise in one regard, the networked relation between heterogeneous

elements, is still complex in its seeming generality. However, to avoid reducing a dispositif to

merely a disparate set, we have to understand that the relation it enacts, and it is quite

important that it is active, is one of establishing the regularity between these elements. The

concept of regularity is central in Foucault’s work. Most notably articulated in The

Archaeology of Knowledge, it entails the engendering of an enunciative homogeneity between

the statements, objects, concepts and/or themes of discursive formations. Despite being

dispersed in different spatial and temporal coordinates, a discourse can appear by virtue of

these components giving voice to, or “saying” the same thing.43 The conditions that define

discourses in their dispersion, is what Foucault calls their positivity. More than just composing

“a limited space of communication” between statements, the deployment of positivities

constitutes their reality, as such, Foucault claims that they play the role of historical a

prioris.44 These a prioris are for Foucault not any objective, transcendental truths

independently true of experience, as they are in Kant, but rather that which is historically

given as truth, “since it is that of things actually said.”45

41 Foucault, 36-37. 42 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New

York: Pantheon Book, 1980), 194. 43Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (And the Discourse on Language), trans. A.M. Sheridan

Smith (New York: Pantheon Books), 1972. 38. 44 Ibid., 126-128. 45 Ibid., 127.

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It is important here to stress again that these positivities are not inert but are productive. One

of Foucault's most prominent uses of “dispositif” comes in the first volume of The History of

Sexuality in a chapter entitled in the original French, “Le dispositif de sexualité”. The English

translation renders this as “The deployment of sexuality” (emphasis mine), and while it

eliminates the actual term, it does exemplify a central aspect of a dispositif that can provide

clarity to the definition given above. The dispositif of sexuality that Foucault identifies are the

discursive, institutional and administrative mechanisms (psychiatry, pedagogy and medicine)

that incited individuals to speak about, or “confess”, their sex, and subsequently recorded,

stored and transmitted this information in “a great archive of the pleasures of sex”.46 What

these archives subsequently made possible through the documentation of discourses was the

use of that knowledge to create a rationality surrounding sex to justify it being spoken about

and categorized.47 The archive, both as a virtual space and actual institutions, is integral to a

dispositif in that it is the system that establishes what can be known at a given time. We will

investigate this later in the analysis, but what is important to note now is that the example

above demonstrates how we can understand a dispositif as an extension of the positivity of a

discursive formation to encapsulate the relations in its enunciations, the regularity between

statements and other material forms, as well as that which is left out, comprising a network of

component parts that compose a truth-effect within a historical formation as a form of

knowledge.

As Deleuze stresses, we should understand this knowledge not only as that which can

be said, but also that which can be seen, for every dispositif “is a mushy mixture of the visible

and the articulable”.48 In his own articulation of Foucault's concept of the dispositif, Deleuze

explains that a dispositif is an ensemble of entangled lines of enunciation and visibility, force,

subjectification and splittage. These first lines, of visibility and enunciation, have to do with

“machines that make one see and speak”, which quite simply are the heterogeneous elements

defining what is perceived as knowledge or truth within a certain historical framework, what

Deleuze calls regime that distribute, the visible and invisible, the sayable and unsayable.49

The trajectory of these lines is not fixed but always involves mutation, due in large part to the

fact that they are enmeshed and intersected by lines of force, that “continually cross between

46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:

Vintage, April 14, 1990), 63-64. 47 Ibid., 24-26. 48 Foucault, 38 49 Gilles Deleuze “What is a dispositif?”, in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. and ed. Timothy J. Armstrong

(New York: Routledge, 1992), 160.

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words and things, constantly waging a war between them.”50 These lines are the virtual design

of the diagram that are drawn within dispositifs. It must be remembered that power in this

sense should not be reduced to “ideology”, the State, or any single governing locus, but is

rather produced immanently within these mechanisms of knowledge. Theirs is a reciprocal

relationship, for if “knowledge consists of linking the visible and the articulable, power is its

presupposed cause; but, conversely, power implies knowledge as the bifurcation or

differentiation without which power would not become an act”.51

Lastly, a dispositif contains lines of subjectification that traverse through it as lines of

flight, ensuring that a dispositif can never be enveloped within a single line. These lines are

processes of individuation which produce subjectivity within the lines of power and

knowledge as a “whole typology of subjective formations”.52 While the dispositif allows

subjects to come into being, they are not “ready made”, or always-already there, which is why

a dispositif should not be defined as an apparatus in the Althusserian sense.53 As Deleuze

notes, the subject arises as a sort of “surplus-value” that is subtracted from the dispositif’s

power/knowledge relations, such that “mix-ups” can occur where subjectification may escape

the processes of its own dispositif in order to be reinserted into another, constituting lines of

splittage.54

This connection is also made by Giorgio Agamben in his advancement of the concept

of the dispositif. Agamben’s definition of the dispositif expands it to encompass “literally

anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model,

control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”55 What’s

more, he stresses that our current era of global capitalism and telecommunication has

engendered an intense proliferation of dispositifs, such that there is not a single moment in an

individual's life that is not caught within one.56 This aligns with Deleuze’s claim that “we

belong to […]and act within” dispositifs.57 For Agamben, the subject is that which arises out

50 “What is a Dispositif,” 160. 51 Foucault, 39. 52 “What is a dispositif?,” 162. 53 For Althusser, subjects are “hailed” by a process of interpellation, where individuals come to recognize

themselves as “concrete subjects” through ideology. Althusser’s now canonical example is the scenario in which

you are walking down the street and hear someone call out “hey, you there” causing you to turn around. In this

turn, you are rendered a subject, because you recognize that the call was “really” addressed to you as the

“always-already” subject of the hailing. Louis Althusser, Lenin And Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben

Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 170-176. 54 “What is a dispositif?”. 162. 55 Giorgio Agamben. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan

Pedatella (California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. 56 Ibid., 15. 57 What is a dispositif?,” 164.

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of the fight between living beings and dispositifs, a fight which we can relate to the “lines of

force” identified by Deleuze. Today, the vast array of dispositifs produce equally diverse

subjectifications in which the same individual can be processed as “the user of cellular

phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories, the tango aficionado, the anti-globalization

activist, and so on and so forth.”58 Here, Agamben is essentially rearticulating Deleuze’s

notion of the dividual as the subject of control societies, ceaselessly modulating from

dispositif to dispositif, nevertheless, remaining within each and every temporal and spatial

situation. However, while Agamben’s definition highlights Foucault’s definition of a

dispositif as a network by pointing to the proliferation of actual networks to which we are

increasingly connected, its breadth risks reducing the specific functionality of networks.

3.5 The Machinic and the Mechanical

How can we understand this functionality then? The crucial aspect of a dispositif is its

relational quality, it never comprises the static operation of any one object, but rather a

dynamic relation between it and other objects, institutions, techniques etc. This opposition can

be further understood as the difference between, to speak with Deleuze & Guattari, the

mechanical and the machinic.

The mechanical, in short, functions through the supposition of a “structural unity”, i.e.

it is a “totality” that works in a specific, limited configuration according to its internal parts.

This may be specific technical device that is used to achieve a specific outcome. YouTube’s

mechanical function would solely be as a platform, composed of an interface and database,

that allows people to upload and stream videos. When we say that YouTube is machinic we

are saying that it cannot be reduced simply to its technics. A machine that is never solely

“individual”, but rather is always in contact with other machines that (re)produce in relation to

each other, constituting a network that extends beyond their respective technical limitations.59

Deleuze and Guattari explicitly state that “the machinic is the synthesis of heterogeneities as

such.”60 The dispositif as concrete machinic assemblage demonstrates the need to think

beyond the mere technical in isolation to encompass the social, diagrammatic forces invested

in the techniques of this socio-technical relation.

58 Agamben, 14-15. 59 Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark

Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 283-289; A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 256-257; 286. 60 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 330.

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To summarize, a dispositif is a machinic meshwork of related instruments and effects,

whether mechanical, technical or institutional etc., that produces regimes of knowledge,

power and subjectification. It is the relation between the nodes that make it work, not some

central point of power. Thus, it is significant that dispositif comes to the fore in Foucault and

Deleuze’s work when dealing with a power that disperses itself via increasingly networked

means, both physically and functionally. Here we might suggest that the digital logic of the

control diagram is actualized by dispositifs that are themselves dependent on the dispersion of

derivative dispositifs. Following Agamben, telecommunications and computation are to a

large extent dependent on objects that themselves constitute networks that work in connection

to other networks. To avoid reducing the dispositif to “literally anything”, we can say that

insofar as any device or object is composed of capacities for the storage of archival regimes

of knowledge, the transmission of power and processing of subjectification and splittage, it is

a dispositif. It is here that we locate YouTube.

In accordance, our analysis will be structured into three parts by examining the

corresponding technical components of the database, interface and user that make these

capacities possible on YouTube. It is an analysis that excavates YouTube’s machinery by

starting from below, i.e. its technical supplements, and then moving up to the layer of the

social only to show that this was already present at the level of the technical.

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4. YouTube's Archive Architecture:

Database, Storage, Knowledge

We will begin our analysis of YouTube by examining what allows lines of software code

traversing through hardware servers to function as the lines of a dispositif, structuring what

can be seen and said on the platform, namely, its database.

4.1 Database as Storage and Sequence The advent of new media, wherein most media objects no longer aim to tell stories but operate

primarily through the equivocal collection of individual elements, has, according to Lev

Manovich, established the database as the privileged form of cultural expression.61 While

stressing that the database is not a uniform object, the user generally experiences the database

as a collection of objects on which it can perform actions such as search, viewing and

navigation, and to which we can add now, thanks to YouTube and other similar services,

upload and streaming.62 The notion of drifting and sifting through a continually accumulating

collection of “objects” in the simple act of clicking between them, sometimes separately,

sometimes simultaneously, is the “anti-narrative” of the database; it has as a medium no

inherent connection to narrative structure, no beginning or end, but simply expands and

extends.63 However, Manovich also states that not all computational technologies are based

on the collective database. Computer games, for instance, operate through the algorithm.

Gaming often requires the experience of narrative framings, of sequentiality and quasi-

causality executed by algorithms, i.e. “find x and bring x to y before z to unlock a”. The more

one plays the more one uncovers the procedural rules and patterns that structure the game, i.e.

“under these conditions this happens”, constituting a feedback loop between user and

algorithm in viewing the calculation of inputs and outputs.64 Manovich identifies the ways in

which algorithms represent data structures as sequences, something which YouTube’s

database architecture makes explicit.

61 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence, 5, no. 2, (1999): 80. 62 Ibid.

63 Manovich is quick to state that databases can still present narrative forms, whether linear, interactive or

otherwise, by users following the links between the recorded and stored multimedia objects. Ibid. 64 Ibid., 83.

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YouTube uses a relational database, which means that it collects and organizes data in related

sets. A relational database is also referred to as an “SQL”, or “Standard Query Language”,

because the data it collects must submit to the domain-specific programming language that

structures it into various relations.65 To put it as simply as possible, SQL is structured by a

collection of “tables”, that are comprised of “columns” of stacked “rows” of “values”. On

YouTube these tables may be data for individual videos, with columns for metadata like

“description”, “views”, or “tags”, of which one row may be designated with the value

“political”. When we type a search into YouTube, we are sending a “query” to the database,

requesting an “entity”, some form of data. SQL algorithms then execute a command that

selects, for instance x rows of the columns “comments” and “likes” from the table named

“user x”, retrieving and transmitting the requested data back up to the interface and user.66

These tables can in turn be related to each other through a process called a “join”, where

multiple tables can be accessed in a single query by algorithms sorting data to find the rows in

each that share the same value, so as to constitute a relation.67

YouTube’s search engine “strives to surface the most relevant results according to

keyword queries” which are then “ranked based on a variety of factors including how well the

title, description, and video content” relate to the particular search (emphases mine).68 The

database algorithms attempt to match users with videos that “cater to each viewer and their

varying interests” by “following the audience”, paying attention to what they do or do not

watch, their likes, dislikes, “not interested” feedback, comments, and time spent watching

videos. Recommendation is not only reserved for the semantics of a search but is invested

throughout the entirety of the platform. After clicking one of the results generated by a query,

the chosen video is played while a stacked column of thumbnails for other “suggested” videos

appear under the banner “Up next” on the right-hand side of the screen. Unless turned off,

these suggested videos automatically begin to play after the current video is done through the

“Autoplay” function.69 In a research article on YouTube’s search and recommendation

algorithms, Google programmers detail how sustained user engagement on YouTube is

dependent on the flow of “fresh” content. In accordance, YouTube’s deep learning neural

65 Alan Beaulieu, Learning SQL (California: O'Reilly Media, Inc, 2005). 5-7. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 8 68 YouTube, “Lesson: Search and discovery on YouTube,” accessed May 22, 2019,

https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/discovery#strategies-zippy-link-8 69 These videos that have been deemed related to the video you are currently watching based on your previous

search and viewing histories, topical similarity (generated by metadata like titles, tags, descriptions) or simply by

virtue of being uploaded by the same channel. Ibid.

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network has been trained to recommend new videos based not only on user histories, for this

tends to have bias toward the past, but also feeding it the “age” of videos so that the flow of

relevant content also accommodates recent uploads.70 YouTube’s database is not a static

storage space but an active one, retrieving results through algorithms whose sequence always

entails a “next” step.

It must be stressed that results that appear here are always-already imbued with rank

and relevance based on their popularity in their respective categories, which is determined not

simply by your engagements, but also on other users deemed related to you by the database

parameters. The process by which algorithms optimize search and recommendation based on

metadata generated by related user inputs is known as collaborative filtering. The very nature

of collaborative filtering is such that as data uploaded to YouTube’s database increases, the

algorithms select data interior to the relations it has already established. While a user’s profile

may seem to be diversified, the data pool’s diversity actually decreases. This establishes

“hegemonic patterns” that ensure, as Galloway states, “structural homogeneity rather than

heterogeneity.”71

While we can maintain that the database is not a narrative, in any ideological or

totalizing sense, YouTube users do not really sit and watch the database as a transcendent

collection structuring their experience. For YouTube’s relational database to work in the

manner that it does, algorithms are required to (re)present data to users in a sequential form as

a consequence of their actions. This is simultaneously, and paradoxically, not the result of any

larger story being written and read to you, but simply a set of choices among other choices.

This vacillation between disparate collection and sequence in the database can be further

understood through what Hiroki Azuma has referred to as the “database-model” of

postmodernity.72 Azuma builds on Lyotard to explore how the postmodern has entailed a shift

from modernity’s “tree-model,” meaning a desire for grand narratives, like ideology, through

which we understand the world, to that of the database. This model has a “double-layer”

structure comprised of a database of “settings” and a surface level of simulacra.73 For Azuma,

the simulacral encompasses both original works and its derivatives, i.e. repurposed and

remixed content, for both are derived from the settings of the database layer, so that a “copy is

70 Paul Covington, Jay Adams, Emre Sargin, “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations,” Google

AI, accessed May 22, 2019.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45530.pdf 71 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 114. 72 Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 61. 73 Ibid., 30-33.

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judged not by its distance from an original but by its distance from the database.”74 What is

important to note is that despite being distinguished from its simulacra, the database is not

“originary”, for the database does not function as the presence, nor loss, of any “grand

narrative”, it does not disseminate any ideological worldview, nor attempt to establish fictions

in lieu of lost teleology, but is rather a grand nonnarrative.

Similar to Manovich, Azuma defines the database as being against narrative, however,

he refers to the surface layer of simulacra as “small narratives”.75 These small narratives

emanating from the database can also be understood as the linking together of stored

multimedia material in distinguished sequences. What we can draw from this is that the

database as a mode of information storage has no narrativity, but when it is in operation, when

it connects to users (as well as other databases and machines), what appears are algorithmic

sequences as small narratives whose supposed cause is not the database as well-spring, but an

actionable field of input/output relations between users and website. However, for a relational

database like YouTube’s to function it needs to be, precisely, relational, and what enables this

is not simply a collection of multimedia materials, but the protocological commands

governing the input/output parameters of the algorithms in order to surface sequences

“naturalized” as the objective outcomes of the sheer act of user (inter)actions.

4.2 Modulate, Relate: The Spatiality of Control Until 2012, YouTube used MySQL, the industry standard SQL database, however, as

YouTube’s user rate steadily grew it was necessary to find an efficient solution for managing

the steadily accumulating data it was amassing and properly serve video streaming. This led

them to fund the development of Vitess, a software tool that allows relational databases to

scale through horizontal partitioning.76 Where SQL databases tend only to scale vertically,

meaning by increasing hardware configurations like CPU and RAM, non-relational databases,

such as NoSQL, are able to segment data into various sub-database groups, or shards, as the

data does not need to be structured in relational manner according to the same language.

YouTube couldn’t simply turn to a NoSQL database as this would forego the collaborative

filtering algorithms that allowed the data to be collected and represented in YouTube’s web

interface as “related”, “top searches” and so on. What Vitess allows YouTube to do is

74 Azuma, 65. 75 Ibid., 34-36. 76 Vitess, “Overview,” accessed May 22, 2019, https://vitess.io/docs/overview/whatisvitess/

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continue collecting and compiling data relationally while partitioning it into horizontal

“shards”. These serve as single sources running certain datasets but are still able to

communicate with the larger database whole.77

This example can help illustrate Deleuze’s insight in his text on control societies on

the reconfiguration of the mass/individual pairing into “databanks” and dividuals. The

horizontal sharding of a relational database quite literally renders the mass of users into what

we might call databasins of information. Indistinguishable 0s and 1s are streamed into the

shared, sharded space where they are not filtered out, but rather filtered into different datasets

and metadata as homogenized digital relations, constituting the identity of a database

constantly being expanded in terms of data input but limited with regard to diversity.

Moreover, YouTube’s database is not insular, it connects to external databases as

well. YouTube is owned by Google which uses the HTTP protocol known as “cookies” in all

its subsidiary websites to track user’s browsing histories, preferences, settings etc., through

their IP addresses, ostensibly to optimize one’s experience. For instance, through its

PageRank algorithm, Google tailors the order of results to appear in line with your previous

search histories.78 Since both Google and YouTube register your IP address when you use

them, and by virtue of deploying the same cookie protocols, the information you deposit when

searching Google feeds into your usage of YouTube, and vice versa. This information is

simultaneously processed by Google’s AdSense program that displays related advertisements

to you based on your browsing.79 What’s more, YouTube allows for the embedding of its

videos into other websites and platforms, whether on your personal blog or on Facebook

timelines, for instance. When such a link is activated, YouTube’s database analytics register

where that particular view is coming from, establishing further links between YouTube and its

users’ other online activities. This fluidity and flexibility of YouTube’s relational database

and its algorithms accentuates the spatial dimension of control and its difference from

disciplinary societies. Where discipline is pyramidic, i.e. vertical, control partitions

horizontally and by homogenizing the heterogeneous so that if one leaves one enclosed space,

one still remains inextricably linked to it while entering another; you are a YouTube user even

when offline. As such, relational database sharding is the spatial logic of control par

excellence. It divides data only quasi-discreetly, because it still functions relationally by

77 Vitess, “Sharding,” accessed May 22, 2019. https://vitess.io/docs/sharding/ 78 Google, “How Google uses cookies,” accessed May 22, 2019,

https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US 79 Google, “Advertising,” accessed May 22, 2019, https://policies.google.com/technologies/ads?hl=en-US

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presenting difference as homeostasis, or simply put, identity. In collecting dispersed data in

relational sets as forms of knowledge, YouTube’s database bears more than surface-level

similarities to the notion of “the archive”.

4.3 An Archive of Attention YouTube is not an “archive” proper since there is no “official” standard of selection for

preserving materials. In Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer’s perspective, this lack of

selection, and what they perceive as YouTube’s lack of interest in storage as a means of

preservation, problematizes the conception of YouTube as an archive. Kessler and Schäfer

consider it an oversimplification to conflate a collection of audiovisual materials such as

YouTube with the archive as an institutionalized practice. In their words, an archive operates

through “strictly codified lines of conduct, that have to observe standards defined by

professional associations, often on an international level.”80 Building on Manovich’s

definition of the database as a cultural form, Kessler and Schäfer define YouTube as a hybrid

of storage and management systems composed of a “deep” level of the database and a surface

layer of the platform interface through which users receive outputs and provide inputs. As we

have discussed, YouTube’s database is not a static storage space because its data is generated

and updated in large part by this input/output dynamic. Kessler and Schäfer note that

YouTube requires user participation in both uploading the videos to be stored as well as

providing the metadata for indexing them, through the explicit video descriptions, titles and

“tags”, and the implicit ratings of views, comments, likes and dislikes.81 As such, users

become aware of the ways in which they affect the database, allowing them to both optimize

the system for itself and for their themselves. User’s tagging or titling videos in a certain way

may garner greater attention, but also misinform, whether deliberately or not, by incorrectly

categorizing content.82

This has significant implications for the spread, ubiquity and popularity of politically-

charged, reactionary content on YouTube. Rebecca Lewis has identified how an “alternative

influence network”, generally characterized by an “opposition to feminism, social justice, or

left-wing politics”, strategically use keywords drawn from popular news stories, as well as

80 Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, “Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information

Management System”, in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National

Library of Sweden, 2009), 277. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid.

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leftist, liberal or generally progressive terminology, to relate themselves to these terms and

appear at the top of search results.83 However, what allows these keyword to take effect is just

as dependent on the algorithmic processing of these inputs. YouTube’s search-ranking system

lists videos based on all manners of content engagement, but it also modulates between

stability and change over time and in relation to current events. As a recent study has shown,

when a major news story hits the most popular content on YouTube tends to be dominated not

by mainstream news outlets, but by native YouTube channels that know to publish reactions

videos and tagging their responses with the buzzwords from the media cycle. During news

events there is generally an increase in search volume for event-specific terms, prompting

YouTubers to upload more content in response in order to apprehend these moments of

concentrated attention. YouTube’s algorithms adapt to these situations by circulating recent,

relevant content.84

While Kessler and Schäfer are right to stress these hybrid specificities in analyzing

YouTube’s database infrastructure, their emphasis on participation is still skewed too heavily

on user input and doesn’t sufficiently account for the specificities of the machine end of the

equation. For the database to receive and process meta-information from its users, certain

input and output parameters have to be programmed, i.e. SQL tables, rows and columns, and

collaborative filtering algorithms we detailed above. Yet, this architecture of optimization

does not operate in isolation, it is also dependent on the larger social infrastructure in which it

participates. Search results are optimized for both user and algorithm, undoubtedly, but also

for the financial gain of the platform itself.

Yves Citton has identified how ubiquitous mediatic technologies have constructed a

diffuse mediasphere aimed at enthralling our attention. In a world saturated by media,

attention has become a thing of value. This is what has been referred to as the “attention

economy”, for unlike classical economics, it does not seek the organization and allocation of

material resources, but rather the managing of a limited capacity for attention within an

overabundant circulation of cultural goods.85 Attention now has a price, and as Citton

explains, companies like Google (implicating YouTube) and Facebook require user

participation to optimize algorithmic search and improve user experience in order for the user

to keep paying attention to, and using, their platform. The basic services YouTube provides,

83 Rebecca Lewis, “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube,” Data & Society,

accessed May 22, 2019, https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf 84 Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Òscar Coromina, “From ranking algorithms to ‘ranking

cultures’: Investigating the modulation of visibility in YouTube search results,” Convergence, 24, no. 1, 63-64. 85 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 8-9.

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for instance, are free, in the sense that monetary payment is not required to stream a video, but

it is also not free in the sense that what YouTube gets in exchange for their services is your

attention. The revenue Google (implicating YouTube) gains by optimizing attention and

information economic model, as Benjamin H. Bratton has elucidated, far exceeds the cost of

providing the services (in 2015 alone this amounted to a gross profit margin of 62.86%) a

differential that constitutes a platform surplus value. For while Google’s search is working for

you, you are also working for Google by training its algorithms to more precisely predict user

demand and desire while your attention is monetized as cognitive capital.86

YouTube requires your user attention in order for them to garner information about

you as both a user who relates to other users, but also as a consumer. Devoting attention and

affective, informational labor to YouTube is done at the expense of reducing the amount of

attention paid to others. Thus, attention, Citton states, becomes a “limited resource” for which

media spectacles compete.87 It follows that visibility on these platforms becomes an

imperative for relevancy and revenue. Therefore, Google and YouTube can sell your attention

and the information it provides to advertising companies who can clog the circulation of data

through “market segments, visibility, impact, manipulating behaviours, occupation of spirits

and access to the imagination”, or simply by paying to have their content appear at the top of

searches.88 Algorithmic storage and search, writes Bratton, turn the web into a “massive peer-

to-peer advertising platform, and the transformation of advertising into a meshwork of

computationally microtargeted points and clicks.”89

So, it is not the case that the way in which users affect what is made visible to the

database software is reducible to the simple cause-and effect of user input determining the

popularity videos and searches, as is tacitly assumed in Kessler and Schäfer. Algorithmic

filtering also encompasses economic imperatives. This entanglement of users, platform,

software and advertising is an emblematic microcosm of the larger mediasphere identified by

Citton which does not merely seek to occupy our attention, but actively recondition it. The

previously discussed feedback loop between database and user is what Citton calls an

“echosystem”, referring to the way in which media condition our attention to resonate with its

reverberations. This system is structured by the high frequency circulation of pre-existing

forms, which should be understood as styles, services, goods, information, images, etc., that

86 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 137. 87 Citton, 31-32. 88 Ibid., 9-10. 89 Bratton, 137.

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serve as formal causes for why our habits comply with choices that are seemingly “free” but

are actually conditioned.90

This itself resonates with Wendy Chun’s claims that what defines digital media, its

technologies and techniques, is the notion of update. For Chun, update is a dynamic of habit

and crisis, whereby once media and their mediations become default, a crisis, or disruption,

comes to engender new habits. YouTube’s algorithms are reliant on this update in order to

keep users interested and engaged, videos are suggested to users in order to ”maximize

engagement”, which is why they are not just recommended but are coming “up next”.91 This

ceaseless cycle of update is a mode of habituation, for it is when media are no longer new,

when they have been repeated to the point of internalization, that they matter most. For

instance, search engines which were once novel have now become the “default mode of

knowledge acquisition.”92 This is a process Citton calls “collective enthrallment” and

“selective collectivization”, since we tend to give our attention over to things which we

recognize, and adopt selected behaviors and tastes according to our environment shaped by

“the collective composition of individual desires”.93 This is precisely how YouTube’s

algorithms work. Their filters are necessarily “collaborative”, concentrating and constricting

your results to certain content already similar to you rather than “freely” circulating

contrasting videos. As Chun elaborates, these habits are presented to the user as their own,

becoming a function of a “YOU” that obfuscates the plural “we” of collective habits that

underlies all these activities.94

To return to Kessler and Schäfer’s definition of the archive as organized by codified

standards in opposition to YouTube’s collection, we can see that YouTube’s database

structure is regulated by standards too. These are governed by actual code, of the technical

software variety, and social, collective habits conditioned by (as will be elaborated in the next

chapter) the forces and relations of production. Moreover, it is interesting to note that Kessler

and Schäfer begin their article by claiming that most characterizations of YouTube as an

archive rid themselves of the epistemological underpinnings of the term as used by Foucault.

For in light of what we have just discussed, it becomes quite clear that any consideration of

YouTube’s hybrid database from the machine, user and social perspectives rather reveals

90 Citton, 29-31. 91 YouTube, “Lesson: Search and discovery on YouTube”, accessed May 22, 2019.

https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/discovery#strategies-zippy-link-8 92 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2016), 1-2. 93 Citton, 33-34. 94 Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 3-4.

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these affinities. Despite lacking the “officiality” of actual, institutional archives, databases

such as YouTube’s function in the same fashion as “the archive” in the Foucauldian sense,

rendering any meaningful distinction irrelevant and ignorant of its implications.

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault defines “the archive” as the system that

establishes statements as events and things with their own conditions of appearance and

possible fields of use; it is the general system of their enunciability and functioning as

discourse.95 The archive is the “first law of what can be said”, that which differentiates

discourses with distinct “circumstances” and “laws of thought”. The archive is the totality of

historical a prioris we discussed earlier, disseminating discourses as knowledge.96 In the case

of YouTube, these discourses are myriad, such that it would seem as if anything can be said,

heard or most importantly seen, considering the endless sequence of images you can stream

on the platform, whether that is a digitized 1987 lecture by Gilles Deleuze on cinema, clips of

the day’s broadcast news from channels as disparate CNN and the Russian RT, or someone

attempting to eat the world’s hottest chili pepper. While this is true in a certain regard, what

we have been trying to show is that their manner of appearance is nevertheless subject to

protocological organization. Certain videos are of course more visible than others, but “rank”

and “relevance” are not natural occurrences. What appears on YouTube always does so

hierarchically. Citton speaks of the way in which attention as information is made

simultaneously discrete and relational in databases that process data through standardized

protocols, in turn producing standardized forms that “preconfigures our perception of

reality.”97 Here, he specifically discusses how the form and content on YouTube depends on

upload restrictions. For instance, in YouTube’s early years, you could upload and share just

about anything provided it did not exceed 10 minutes in length.98 These length restrictions no

longer apply now, however, the way videos are tagged and titled serve the same function. So

too does the amount of time spent watching a video, as well as certain sequences of related or,

prior to the moment of your clicking, unrelated videos. This is certainly why among the most

popular types of videos are similar in form even if the content is not necessarily the same, as

we saw in regard to the “alternative influence network” above.

All this allows YouTube to homogenize the videos streamed down into the database

and up to its interface by way of a hierarchization of attention aggregates; that which attracts

95 The Archaeology of Knowledge (And the Discourse on Language), 129-130. 96 Ibid., 128-131. 97 Ibid., 67-70. 98 Ibid.

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the most attention is that which corresponds to reverberations of the media echosystem and

thus, most visible and valuable. This is one way in which YouTube’s database standardizes its

form and functions akin to an archival law. The database tables, columns, rows, entities, and

search and retrieval algorithms are the lines of visibility and enunciation crisscrossing the

database of the dispositif, disseminating and distributing its knowledge into filtered regimes.

It quite literally makes videos visible, as you can stream these videos while at the same time

see thumbnails images for other related and recommended videos. There is, of course, the

option of fullscreen mode in which all you see is video you are streaming, but this too points

to the ways in which visibility is dispensed across the platform, and a significant one at that,

because it serves to reiterate the impression that your clicks are choices that cause things to

“naturally” happen. Such is the algorithmic “small narrative” being presented by the database

algorithms. The database actively collects and categorizes attention through its users

providing information about people, places, videos, and the relations between them as

knowable forms for the database to process and in turn transmit to its users and advertisers.

As Bratton states, search is an “epistemological technology” that can expand “the uncertain

discreteness of “what” can be searched for in the first place.”99

This also demonstrates the extent to which algorithmic operations are quasi-

autonomous. Despite being publicly known that YouTube’s search engine optimizes through

data gathering, the actual way in which the software works is not. This points to yet another

projection of light in its dispositif, which is the fact that you can see the work of the

algorithms through its recommendations, but not how. It masks its movements. What we do

know, is that search results appear as normalized forms that in turn affect what information is

transferred and transformed in the database. Whereas “the archive” is a system of difference,

the database, as we have seen, differentiates on the basis of identity. We can propose here that

if “the archive” is law of the analog, of discipline, the database is the digital command of

control.

4.4 Hard-Drive, Death-Drive With these differences in mind, however, we can gage an aspect of congruence between

digital and “analog” archives stemming from this discrepancy. Derrida, in his working

through of the concept, notes that the word “archive” derives from the Greek arkhe that refers

at once to commencement, as the place where history and nature originate, and commandment,

99 Bratton, 136.

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from where law and order is exercised.100 The archive must be understood as that primary

place in which the historical, physical, ontological and juridical are born and reside. Of

course, what Derrida is doing is deconstructing the notion of the archive, demonstrating that

the foundation upon which it rests, and its rules resound, can only be that which founds by

being founded. This is what Derrida has elsewhere referred to as the “originary violence”

through which the law establishes authority without affirmation or negation by any exterior,

interior or anterior legitimacy, such that its grounding is a simultaneous ungrounding in a

“mystical foundation of authority”.101 This mystical place is the home of the archive. It

commands because it commences, but it commences because it commands, and in each

instance, is an act of violence.

As Derrida elaborates, the force of law is such that it exists only to be re-instituted and

re-inscribed by constant consecration, such that it is followed, not in the name of some vague

idea of justice, but simply because it is law.102 Not surprisingly then, Derrida claims that the

archive cannot function without techniques of repetition. That is, the archive requires

externalization in an exterior substrate, whether an official archive, a monument, a library, or

a database, so that it can consign and gather together signs into a system that articulates “the

unity of an ideal configuration.”103 The archive is not a living memory that is spontaneously

remembered through any internal experience, but must be reproduced and re-inscribed in

order to be memorized and repeated further. However, Derrida explains that this repetition

compulsion is inexorably bound to what Freud identified as the death drive, or destruction

drive. This drive incites forgetfulness, it works to annihilate memory, but in doing so it is

mute, because forgetting is only made possible by the simultaneous effacement of forgetting

itself. The death drive destroys memory, and as such, any memory, or archive, of itself. The

consequence of this is that the very thing that makes archiving possible, repetition, also

exposes it to destruction, meaning that the archive is inextricably linked to what Derrida dubs

the archiviolithic.104 The archive is an amnesiac in that it forgets, but it is also hypomnesic in

that it impairs memory. This is to say the mnemotechnical supplements through which the

archive is externalized and repeated actively affect how and what is consigned in their

100 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics, 25, No. 2,

(Summer, 1995): 9. 101 Jacques Derrida “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority”, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of

Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002) 234-242. 102 Ibid., 251-253. 103 “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” 10. 104 Ibid., 13-14.

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technical structure. Writes Derrida, “archivization produces as much as it records the

event.”105

When Derrida wrote this, the archive’s status as a physical place one had to enter was

starting to shift on account of digitization. Yet, to access the digital database archive there

must be a material base in the form a server and hard-drive to function, as well as a technical

interface that translates data into legible fonts and images. Even if you do not physically

“enter” the database, it is, nevertheless, material. If we look at the technical structure of

YouTube’s database as digital archive, we will see that algorithmic command of continual

update has only intensified its archiviolithic nature. It is worth pointing out that when Derrida

defines the archive’s principle of consignation he states that there should not be any “absolute

dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate […] or partition, in an absolute

manner (emphasis mine).”106 This invokes the image of YouTube’s sharding of metada

through Vitess into discrete bits only to express absolute unity as database.

The command of the database as digital archive, its arché, as Wolfgang Ernst has

elucidated, resides within these algorithmic dynamics where storage and streaming are

subsumed into one another.107 As modes of machine learning, the algorithms within databases

like YouTube’s process information inputs by memorization under erasure. This is to say that

clicks, comments, and cookies are fed into the database as requests to be instantly stored

while simultaneously being read and written by algorithms transferring them back up the

layers of stacked transmission protocols. Every instance of information storage and transfer

entails a rewriting of this algorithmic memory as these new datasets need to be added,

aggregated and related; algorithms remember YOU by actively rewriting their profile of YOU

in relays of relation. In the database, the spatial and temporal organizational “lag” of the

archive has been short-circuited, there is “no more delay between memory and the present but

rather the technical option of immediate feedback turning all present data into archival entries

and vice versa.”108 For Ernst, digital archives are much more time critical than traditional

archives as they are based on the temporary. Preservation and present circulation form a

closed circuit, whereas in traditional, emphatic archives data retrieval is an experiential gap.109

105 “Archive Fever: A Fredudian Impression,” 17. 106 Ibid., 10. 107 Wolfgang Ernst, “Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories”, in Digital Memory and the

Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 97-98.

108 Ibid., 98. 109 This “experience” of the analog archive is also flattened when data becomes digital, when the differences

between text, image and sound all become commensurate as code. Ibid., 100.

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This dynamism of the temporary is what Wendy Chun has called the enduring ephemeral of

new media.110 Building on Ernst, Chun dispels the notion that the computer has engendered

the permanent storage and retrieval of memory, but states rather that what defines digital

memory is its degeneration in terms of its permanent rewriting. Computational devices must

erase their memories so as to be able to store the programs that allow them to store

information, which is itself continually being updated. Their hard-drives are quite literally

driven by the destruction of memory, refreshing what and how they remember by endlessly

regenerating images and texts on a degenerative basis. This entails that the temporal

dimension of digital objects is reduced to a “nonsimultaneous new”, for when they are new,

they are already old, which in turn permits their rediscovery as “new”; the future becomes a

memory.111 Contrary to the notion that telecommunications is defined solely by the speed at

which things appear and disappear, Chun maintains that this ephemerality endures because

information endlessly reappears and repeats while its mode of storage always forgets.112 A

YouTube video from 2009 can suddenly become a viral sensation ten years after it has been

uploaded only to be forgotten again as a another video takes its place as that week’s, or days’

even, meme.

In Kessler and Schäfer’s dismissal of YouTube’s database as archive through an

underdeveloped reference to Foucault and epistemology, they state that the impermanence of

its mode of storage better suits labelling YouTube as a “perpetual transmission” than an

archive.113 However, what we have elucidated here is the opposite. The collapse of storage

and transmission is also the collapse of the traditional, institutional model of the archive,

which in turn highlights the epistemological implications of such a shift, precisely, in the

Foucauldian sense. YouTube’s database engenders certain effects in the sense of what is

knowable and how. As such, databases have become just as important, if not more so, than

“actual” archives and necessitate a rethinking of what an archive as institution is. If “there is

no political power without control of the archive” as Derrida asserts, today this means there is

no power without the database as archive, for these are intrinsic and inseparable from the

logic of control itself.114 We will now turn to an examination of these power effects within

YouTube’s knowledge production through database destruction.

110 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral or, the Future is a Memory”, in Media Archaeology:

Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erik Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

California: University of California Press, 2011), 184. 111 Ibid., 197-199. 112 Ibid., 199-200. 113 Kessler and Schäfer., 276. 114 “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” 11.

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5. An Ecology of Finitude:

Interface, Transmission, Power

In this chapter we will examine the ways in which power is transmitted through YouTube’s

digital dispositif and how it relates the function of power in the larger diagram of control. We

will be focusing on the diffuse techniques of power that incite, induce, seduce, include and

exclude, in a word, produce certain effects and relations immanent to YouTube’s socio-

technical machinery. For instance, in saying that YouTube is symptomatic of the logic of

control societies, we are not simply saying that control exerts itself upon YouTube, but that

the entanglements of forces within YouTube is emblematic and productive of control itself. It

makes certain logistics of control possible; they are co-constitutive.

5.1 Interfacing Mediation and Representation The shift toward online streaming as the dominant mode of consuming moving images

brought on by YouTube and the like, entails, according to Geert Lovink, that we now “watch

databases”.115 While not ignoring what Lovink means, which is related to what we discussed

in the previous chapter, it is not really the case that we stream videos by looking at databases

collecting and linking multimedia material. Despite knowing that these processes are

happening, we are not privy to the database’s actual labor, but only its results as they appear

on screens. We are not spelunking down in the deep of the database, we surf on the surface of

the interface. This surface is not reducible to a technical device, such as the computer or

smartphone. YouTube’s website is itself a software interface embedded within such a

hardware interface. Interfaces do more than just project the database on various screen media,

they mediate between database and user. If the database was the socio-technical layer of

YouTube that stored, selected and produced knowledge as an archival law of what can be

seen, said or heard, then the interface is the layer that transmits lines of force. It is where

database, screen and user interface with power.

In this regard, it is useless to speak of the interface as solely the result of technical

hardware mediums. Such a position contends that YouTube is useless without the device that

115 Geert Lovink, “The Art of Watching Databases: Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader”, in Video Vortex

Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network

Cultures, 2008), 9.

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supports it, which strikes us as not just willfully reductionist, but naïve. For as Alexander

Galloway illustrates, the interface is primarily an effect. One has to consider the mediations of

storage, transmission and processing as mediums themselves to account for the techniques of

power they engender.116 An interface is a threshold. It mediates between subjects and objects,

states and things. A computer, for example, is a threshold between a user and YouTube’s

website. Yet, it is not simply a matter of physical separation, but of the material processes that

occur between the edge and center, or screen/user, screen/website, website/database etc.,

wherein one material is comprehended as distinct from another. Writes Galloway, “the

interface is a general technique of mediation evident at all levels; indeed it facilitates the way

of thinking that tends to pitch things in terms of “levels” or “layers” in the first place.”117 For

instance, the distinction between data and an algorithm in a database is artificial, they are but

sequences of binary digits. The working of the interface is what makes them perceptible as

different.118 YouTube’s most basic interfacial function is the reduction of various code and

metadata into distinct images and texts, like a video thumbnail and its title, that mediates

between stillness and streaming so that clicking on one video brings it into the center.

Unlike cinema or photography, the digital interface is not a window that transparently

passes from the inside to outside, nor a door that sometimes closes this passage, but is the

“zone of indecision” between the two wherein this separation never fully succeeds. As

Galloway elaborates, the interface doesn't work because at the moment of its functioning it

breaks down and points to its own mediation. The edge is always present at the center, the

working of the interface is as such “unworkable”.119 This is apparent in the case of YouTube

where within one “frame” of the interface you may be watching a video while thumbnail

images and texts recommend other videos on which you can click to interrupt the current

stream. The browser window displaying YouTube, too, is transparent, such that you can peek

into any other neighboring windows that may be open. Of course, you can always shut the

door on these other options by enclosing your view in fullscreen mode. However, clicking on

that icon acknowledges the edge by making it disappear, it is itself the result of interfacing

between levels. The fullscreen window reinvests the split between screen and user with the

increased awareness of the technical supplement framing it as a threshold between the screen

and the world. The increased mobility of interfaces enabled by portable devices further

116 The Interface Effect, 18. 117 Ibid., 54. 118 Ibid., 33. 119 Ibid.

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disrupts this centrifugal off-screen space of the image only to centripetally bring actual offline

space into the fold of the online and vice versa. The threshold between screen and off-screen

remains undecided.

The unworkability of the interface is also an effect of disruptions that do not derive

from a user’s clicks, but from technical contingents like network connection or computer

memory. On YouTube, there is always an awareness of the quality of the image, both of its

opacity (pixel resolution varies from 144p to high-definition 1080p), as well as playback (how

long a video takes to load and whether or not it buffers as it plays), which is determined by

factors like Wi-Fi signal strength, network routers, or the processing power of the technical,

interfacial device. The interface is, nevertheless, similar to cinema in that it aims to establish

continuity, but where classic cinematic continuity attempted to make editing seamless, the

perfection of YouTube’s interface is its imperfection. The glitch is part of the fabric of its

whole.

While the effect of these processes is made apparent in the sense we have discussed,

its actual operations are not. We saw this already in the discussion of the manner in which the

database presents what it has processed as related to users, but never how. As a result,

scholars have noted, most notably Wendy Chun, the structural similarity between software

and ideology. For Chun, the notion that the computer is “transparent”, that it makes

everything visible, is at odds with its main function being that it computes. This transparency

is contingent upon forgetting “the fact that computers always generate text and images rather

than merely represent or reproduce what exists elsewhere”.120 Again, it is important to stress

the fact of generation, which involves both degeneration and regeneration. User input of data

and metadata are not simply reproduced as results on the interface, the database actively

produces results that engender reproduction. YouTube’s software keeps part of its operations

hidden to the users making requests of it. Input and output are made available, but the

rendering of one into the other is redacted, leaving only the apparent equation that “input =

output”.

This obfuscation pertains to what is called “information hiding” whereby pieces of

code and/or algorithms are encapsulated or concealed within the transcoding of one data

object to another. For instance, when viewing the graphic layout of images and fonts on a

website, we are not seeing the actual HTML protocol that generates it, but rather the result of

its translation.121 This is as banal as saying that YouTube does not appear on your browser

120 Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 17. 121 The Interface Effect. 66-67.

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like a bubbling blob of numbers, but as distinct thumbnail images and legible words that we

can click in order to access a certain video or function. Yet, YouTube would not work without

it. This demonstrates again how visibility is everything on YouTube, not merely in terms of

what videos we see or don’t see, but of what makes these regimes of visibility possible in the

first place, namely the code.

This leads Chun to take the position that software is an analogous to ideology because

it evinces clear affinities with commodity fetishism in Marxist analyses of ideology, wherein

the commodity form is that which obfuscates the social relations of production, making them

appear rather as an objective value of economic relations.122 However, Galloway stresses that

software is not a “functional analog to ideology” because it is itself functional in a manner

that ideology is not. Ideology is a “narrative” in that something comes to be represented as the

function of something else, its language is “expressive”. Software, on the other hand, is first

and foremost “machinic” because it does not express, but executes instructions for a machine

to run; software, effectively, does what it says.123 You click on a thumbnail it plays the video,

you press the pause button and it freezes, you type in a new search and it produces relevant

results, you click one option and produce related options, you click one thing to produce

another set of clicks, and so on ad infinitum. YouTube’s software represents its operations in

text and images, such as recommended videos, based on user input, but what is significant is

that this is merely “representation as mathematical recoding, not as any socially or culturally

significant process of figuration, yet at the end of the day what emerges is exactly that.”124

This leads Galloway to conclude that software is a simulation of ideology.125 YouTube’s

interface presents its mediation as representation, and what it represents are relations of

information; electric signals pass through fiber optic hardware transformed into codes that

translate information into images and text that appear based on the information YOU as a user

have sent into the database. It is a power that induces the effect that “what you see is what you

get” because “what you get is what you (want to) see”.

5.2 Transmitting Transparency: Visibility is an Ad YouTube’s interface is a point of transmission. In a sense, it's like a shipping port or dock,

through which goods, affects, percepts, and images flow as encoded information. Every video

122 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, 51-54. 123 The Interface Effect, 69-72. 124 Ibid., 74. 125 Ibid.

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upload, every search and every click, entails the production of information, and of data into

metadata. Information begets information in such a way that it becomes a force of production,

it is, in a word, a power. Information has become something of value, a register of attention,

interests, preferences, patterns and relations between personal, corporate, institutional and

machinic users alike. Not surprisingly, YouTube’s dispositif teems with lines of power that

act upon the flow of information in order to harness its force.

Certainly, YouTube’s heralding as a democratic patfrom is due in most part to the

possibilities it affords for the mass dissemination of information as a means of communication

across the globe. YouTube is one of the largest points of transmission for information in the

world, and undoubtedly the largest in terms of moving images. It provides not only

connections between disparate videos but connects these to people distributed in the

space/time of the here and now, what Manuel Castells has identified as the transformation

from the “space of places” to the “space of flows” in the information economy. This amounts

to the way in which localities have been deterritorialized of their geographical, historical and

cultural meaning by being embedded within global information networks. Networks, which

are materially supported by the arrangement of technological infrastructures like information

systems, telecommunications and transportation lines, that enable the simultaneity of social

practices between spatially non-contiguous places.126

This has made it a particularly useful tool for the documentation of protests,

demonstrations and social movements, specifically forms of citizen activism and witnessing,

or as argued by Sam Gregory, it can facilitate a platform for human rights advocacy.127

Notable examples of this were the live streams and videos that were recorded and circulated

during the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of 2010 and 2011, respectively. These videos

were watched en masse around the world and offered local, collective and individual

perspectives not privy to mainstream news outlets, both for lack of access and incentive, to

large numbers of people separated by both distance and time. YouTube allowed for the

allocation of attention and communication of information about who, what, where, when and

why events were happening. There is a quote from around the time of the Arab Spring that

says that people were using “Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and

126 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), xxxii; 406. 127 Sam Gregory, “Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of

Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent”, in Video Vortex Reader II:

Moving Images Beyond YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (Amsterdam: Institute of Network

Cultures, 2011), 268-280.

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YouTube to tell the world.”128 This illustrates the manner in which YouTube serves as a

means to communicate information in and of the world, more specifically how information

becomes a power that makes things visible, perceptible and knowable. YouTube’s interface

mediates between database, screen and user, people and places in a mediation that takes the

appearance of a, paradoxically, un-mediated form of communication. This interface effect of

unmediated representation makes YouTube into a domain of videos representing information

as knowledge. Videos uploaded to YouTube serve as both records and representations of what

they stream, whether indexing a moment of social upheaval in Tahrir Square, or the viral

video “Charlie Bit My Finger” archiving the time a young boy was bitten by his brother as

well as what the epitome of what 2007 visual culture was like. The lines of visibility and

enunciation we discussed above are rendered into a regime of knowledge characterized by

visibility itself. The equation “input = output” induces a truth effect that anything and anyone

can be made visible as accessible and addressable information is hoisted to the level of the

known.

However, that which YouTube archives is made known on the interface by the same

instantaneous dynamic of storage and transmission present in the database. The searchable

and clickable videos that appear on YouTube can communicate across spatial and temporal

dimensions, both in the immediate instance of its upload, or well after. The event is both

relayed in the present and preserved as the past retrievable for the future. This effect induces a

time that is “out of joint”, to paraphrase Hamlet. YouTube does not simply record and reflect

a reality that is uploaded onto it, it produces this reality in its archiviolithic image, projecting

a world composed of clips. The clip also helps us understand how the algorithmic sequences

simulating small narratives, representation and ideology, on the interface works, because a

clip evokes a whole from which it is extracted, whether a film or related videos, while

nevertheless, always insisting upon its own independence.

YouTube’s interface mediates between knowledge and power through effects of

visibility, simulating transparency and representation. Describing the disciplinary ways of

seeing, Foucault asserted that “visibility is a trap.”129 The creation of the discrete individual

was the direct result of discipline’s panoptic, mass surveillance apparatuses whose intended

effect was to act as if one was always being watched.130 Today, visibility is still a trap, but in

128 Philip N. Howard, "The Arab Spring's Cascading Effects", Pacific Standard, June 14, 2017, accessed May 22,

2019, https://psmag.com/economics/the-cascading-effects-of-the-arab-spring-28575 129 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 200. 130 Ibid., 201.

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a significantly different sense. Techniques of control do not enclose but modulate, such that

norms are flexible. On YouTube, all video genres can be coalesced into user communities. No

niche is too obscure, no obscurity too niche. This recording of information appears in the first

place to optimize the functioning of the platform for the user rather than the other way around.

YouTube’s interface effect is a technique of power that incites YOU to make yourself visible,

even if you know that your information is also being monitored and sold to advertisers. YOU

no longer need to act as if you are watched because you know you always are, such that

surveillance becomes naturalized to the point that you act as if you are not being watched.

Visibility is an ad. Quite literally, YouTube displays advertisements, but it also advertises

YOU as a consumer of these ads. Users also advertise themselves in any number of ways, as

artists, content creators, entrepreneurs etc. So too do the videos, in the sense that they wish to

rally attention around the information they are trying to communicate, regardless of whether

or not the incentive is to earn revenue. Finally, visibility is an ad for visibility itself. YouTube

offers itself as a mode of representation, where YOU can be seen, by others and by yourself,

as data and metadata.

5.3 Vectoral Forces and Relations in the

Informational Mode of Production Our invocation of naturalization in regard to YouTube’s interfacial simulation of

representation leads us to a larger issue concerning informational power in the space of flows.

Taken at face value it would seem that YouTube is emblematic of the abundant ubiquity of

information freely accessible and communicable in our global information society. Of course,

as we have already gleaned, the conditions for the exchange of information are exactly that,

an exchange, and not free. We suggested that YouTube was a shipping dock, but in another

sense, it is a toll booth. The toll for passage paid by users is the depositing of information and

devotion of attention. The database and algorithms in turn have to interpret and translate this

data into more information so as to further attract and capture the attentional capital of users.

For a website like YouTube to be as popular and profitable as it is, this abundance of

information needs to be made scarce. Despite the persistent myth that information is

accessible and available to everyone, everywhere all the time for free, the flow of information

is on the contrary, highly regulated in several respects. Writes McKenzie Wark, “Information

wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains.”131 In other words, the struggle over the spread

131 McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 68.

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of information makes YouTube’s interface a point of transmission for power, more

specifically, power over information.

The informational mode of production has prompted new technological means for

mapping the globe in diffuse, distributed networks. As analyzed by Wark, the emergence of

telecommunications, which expanded the mass of the mass-media, despite bringing more

information to the public, became increasingly privatized by reducing it to the commodity and

property form. This resulted in the birth of a new vectoralist class, so named because they

command the vectors through which information is abstracted. Rather than being the

producers of information, vectoralists increasingly own the means of its provision. Whether

hardware, software, telecommunications, marketing firms or simply websites, if it conducts

stocks and flows of information it is a vector than can be controlled.132 YouTube is such a

vector. It stockpiles information in its database like user investments into certain likes,

dislikes, trends and genre while simultaneously circulating this data and proliferating endless

derivative metadata in the form of streamable videos. YouTube’s name itself is particularly

apt for illustrating how vectors, including its own, work. YouTube is a tube through which

YOU “broadcast yourself”, as their old slogan used to say, into the depths of the database

where it is processed and drawn back up to YOU. Whether you are stationary or on the move,

on the “Home” page or a third-party website, (YOU)tubing can be done anywhere. While the

relational flow inside the tube remains intact, the inputs and outputs it connects can be

modulated. Certainly, one of the primary reasons why Google chose to acquire YouTube was

to seize the opportunity of cornering a nascent market and furthering their attempts to

monopolize the flow of information.133

As a commodity, information is exchanged primarily not for a monetary equivalent

but for other information. To stream a YouTube video a payment in information is required,

which is then sold to advertising companies who sell this information back to you through

ads. Not only has information become a commodity in this sense, but as Wark elaborates,

various juridical measures, such as patents and copyright laws, have subjected information to

the intellectual property form. For a long time, YouTube videos containing copyrighted

material, whether music excerpts or clips from old movies and TV shows, would more often

than not be blocked or removed for infringement of the DCMA copyright by the corporate

entities who owned them. Much of the novelty of YouTube resided in the uploading and

132 A Hacker Manifesto., 20-21; 25; 51; 60; 64. 133 Christian Fuchs, Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 2008),

186.

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sharing of rare, forgotten material for others to re-discover or perhaps discover for the first

time, as well as the possibility of remixing existing content into new forms.

This situation, of course, became untenable for YouTube, but also for the vectoral

media corporations, since modes of consumption increasingly shifted from the products of a

traditional culture industry to online service-based platforms like YouTube, Amazon and

Spotify. However, the culture industries did not wither away. Instead, they adapted and

migrated to these changes. In fact, these companies were able to consolidate their power over

the proliferation of information by integrating, and emulating, these platforms into their own

structures. Doing so, allowed them to capture mass-consumer attention and direct it into areas

previously out of its reach. Eventually, YouTube struck deals with most of the media

conglomerates that own the vast majority of popular multimedia entertainment in order to

have their content streamable on YouTube and monetized through ad revenue.134 This is

emblematic of the logic of control in that vectoral power can diversify their portfolios under

the same homogeneous, gaseous “soul” of the corporation.135

These third parties influence not just what, but how and where, their content is made

available. Certain material is only accessible in certain countries through the process called

geo-blocking. This dialectic between seemingly unbounded search and geographic restriction

evokes Deleuze’s image of the control city in which movement is free until it is suddenly is

not.136 Every step deposits data, it can be suspended at any time, sometimes completely, i.e.

the removal of content, or sometimes by gating, such that access requires a password or code.

On YouTube this can be circumvented through monthly payments for YouTube Premium

which provides affordances not available to the regular user, such as being able to stream

more copyrighted content, as well as download them to your device or stream them without

ads. Advertising content can also be circumvented by downloading a free JavaScript plug-in

called AdBlock, which blocks advertisements from appearing on YouTube. This allows for

an, in the plug-in’s own words, “unobtrusive” browsing experience for users.137 While ads

are made invisible to the users who have this installed, they are still embedded and functional

134 Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information

(Cambridge, MA, 2015), 93-94. Moreover, this assuaging of pressures from media conglomerates, gaining

access to otherwise restricted content and in turn providing advertisers and corporations with a larger user

demographic is a significant factor in making YouTube the standardizing video streaming service, beating out

competitors like Vimeo or Daily Motion. 135 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6.

136 Ibid., 7.

137 Google, “Chrome Web Store,” accessed May 22, 2019,

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom?hl=sv

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to the myriad others who don’t. This is why AdBlock can be freely available on Google

Chrome’s own web store. In fact, AdBlock can be seen as a technique that reiterates the effect

that YouTube is democratically transparent.

Information as property is not merely limited to content, but just as important are the

software protocols, algorithms and programs that make the distribution of content possible.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is proprietary, so too is Vitess. What is important is that

vectoral power is distributed in YouTube’s dispositif through several different forces that both

interact and compete in various ways to constrict, capture and coerce flows of information,

but in each case an effect is an induced that it appears to circulate freely, inciting more

information to be deposited and seducing more attention to be devoted.

5.4 Third Nature.zip / Second Nature.mov /

Nature.jpg Information cannot exist without actual material, technical support. Yet, as elucidated by

Wark, it is the apparent dematerialization of information into some primordial, liberated flow

by vectoral power that abstracts it from its material basis and bases, so that it can be captured,

commanded and controlled. Telecommunications industries and intellectual property laws

produce an effect of telesthesia, or perception at a distance, where the flow of information

comes to appear as separate from the objects and subjects of its production, so the latter

become only recipient conduits, as opposed to actual conditions, of communication. Perceived

this way, the commodified flow of information and the proprietary relations between

informational producer and provider become “natural”.138 When pastoralism abstracted

property from natural land, and capitalism abstracted the commodity from natural resources,

nature was appropriated into a reified thing from which to extract value. The natural world

was transformed into commodities and properties as an “undistorted essence” which Lukacs-

via-Marx called second nature.139 The doubling of nature was commodified through an

apparently “natural” process, as “the necessity of necessity which is really no more than the

appearance of appearance.”140 In other words, through the logic of representation.

For Galloway, second nature is an aestheticizing force that vitalizes matter. He follows

the definition of life as that which resists entropy, but also that “life forms, both artificial and

138 A Hacker Manifesto, 74-76; 79-80; 135. 139 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness:

Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 86. 140 A Hacker Manifesto, 75.

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organic, exist in any space where material forces are actively aestheticized.”141 Protocol, in

that it regulates the flow of data between semi-autonomous, local decision-making algorithms

and codes, understood as vital agents, is such a force. These codes manage information about

life itself as matter becomes metadata about people, places and things, “quantifiable,

recordable, enumerable, and encodable” into characteristics.142 This is how the collaborative

filtering algorithms that populate YouTube function. As forms of artificial intelligence they

can reduce life to a pattern that both predicts and produces user likes and dislikes etc.143

However, as we have noted, these algorithms are inherently self-destructive, the means by

which they aestheticize matter are as contingent upon archiviolithic code as they are the

codification of life.

If second nature is tied to ideological representation, perhaps it does not sufficiently

account for the ways in which YouTube’s simulates this process. The emergence of vectoral

power creates a situation in which this second nature is also provided “an environment, within

which it comes to represent itself as the spectacle of a natural order”, which Wark calls third

nature.144 This third nature is a topological space that molds territories into various

compressed and twisted shapes “that control the movement and deployment of industrial

resources, which in turn command the extraction and deployment of natural resources.”145

Third nature necessarily arises alongside the passage from disciplinary societies to control

societies, from modern sovereignty to postmodern empire, from an industrial to an

informational mode of production. Third nature envelops the envelope, that is, it doubles both

nature and second nature. This double abstraction is thus part and parcel with software’s

simulation of ideology and the simulacral derivatives of the database; it is the reproduction of

social reproduction. Writes Wark, “[t]hird nature, in its very totality, its spectacle of vectors

and vectors of spectacle, becomes an ecology of images which [...] relentlessly enfolds the

subject in images of the world as its object.”146 To this we can add that the envelope that is

third nature contains several folds through which it is represented. It folds its topology into

increasingly minute and discrete shapes, with its creases simulating deterritorializing lines

that when traced, nevertheless, are reterritorialized into a homogeneous, digital representation

141 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 113. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., 113-114. 144 A Hacker Manifesto, 79. 145 McKenzie Wark, “The Vectoralist Class,” e-flux, no. 65, August 29, 2015, accessed May 22, 2019,

http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/topics/supercommunity/

146 A Hacker Manifesto, 80.

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of itself. YouTube is one such fold, and a particularly noteworthy one, because its platform is

itself an environment that functions through the circulation of images.

5.5 cmd.exe:// Possible > Probable > Inevitable As said, not only are YouTube and what we view it with, interfaces, so too are the actual

videos YouTube make available for streaming. As Bratton states, similar to Galloway, an

interface is the “generic structuring of links and boundaries […] any point of contact between

two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems.”147 The

most evident comutational interfaces are GUIs (graphical user interfaces), wherein protocols

allow algorithms to appear as visual representations, such as icons and symbols, on a device.

These images execute actions. The play button on YouTube, for instance, can start a video,

transforming into a pause button, which then can also stop the stream. Computation renders

the image a technology. Images in this sense don't just stand in for other things, they become

signs as tools. An image is a “visualization of a machinic network and of the outcomes that it

claims to mediate; the formation of its interfaciality is an arc of translation from a set of

possibilities into a visual instrument.”148 As instruments these images are tools to perform a

certain function, but where other interfacial technologies, like a hammer or movie screen, can

be used for something other than what they were made to do, graphic and image-based

interfaces thrive on the conflation of their operations with essence. That is, their functionality,

by being based on calculable, mathematical formulas and properties, appears to be logical.

This means that even if you can game YouTube’s algorithms enough to deliberately deflect its

optimization away from your actual preferences to something completely random, or to boost

prominence as discussed in the previous chapter, they are still apparently doing what they

have been told and tell themselves to do. If you can manipulate the search to produce certain

results this is because we know that certain actions generate certain consequences, or that

actions generate consequences in the first place.

Protocols are synonymous with, and defined by, possibility. They encapsulate within

them every possible connection enabled by the semantic rules of its programming language.

Failure to do results in an error, for standards do not compute slang.149 The protocological is

the possible, or in other words, the database is a collection of possible material choices, which

147 Bratton, 220. 148 Ibid., 223-224. 149 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 52-53; 167, 168.

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algorithms make it possible for you to access. YouTube’s relational database processes search

in such a way that the results it generates results appear to be representations of inputs when

in fact its modes of relation reconfigure the inputs they are supposedly reproducing. The

character of this pseudo-ideological sequence begins, or simulates a beginning, with this

notion of possibility. However, these possibilities are processed as probabilities before

crossing the threshold of the interface. Collaborative filtering algorithms record and register

your preferences on the basis of which it can predict content you will want to see in the form

of related and recommended videos. This is a technique that generates the effect that what it

produces is an objective calculation of possible outcomes into probable preferences. Yet, in

the case of YouTube it becomes quite clear that the probable is merely a step in the sequence

of the algorithm. The image on the screen is something else, it is a result, an end, an

inevitability. The workings of YouTube quite clearly demonstrate how algorithmically driven

relational databases are interfaced not merely as probabilities but become habituated to the

level of the common place, to the natural, in such a way that their effects become inevitable.

While software obfuscates how it works, it does not hide the fact that it is working. The

hiding of the actual algorithmic process is countered by a simulated transparency.150

YouTube’s interface is always caught between working too well and not working at

all. You can find what you’re looking for insofar as you wade through the filtering of the most

popular videos, and moreover, related videos are always, almost accurate. Blips in the

continuity of the algorithm may range anywhere from the comically disparate to the

diametrically opposed, but by virtue of algorithmic protocol not being able to countenance

error, these anomalies become inevitable accidents and no less “true”. The flipside to this is

overdetermination, whereby clicking or searching for a video in a certain genre, like political

commentary channels, leads to the almost immediate flooding of related videos in that genre.

What might merely be something you are interested in for a moment is executed as such by

algorithms but is expressed at the level of an interest as habit on the interface.

This dialectic of execution and expression conflates function and result, personal choice and

algorithmic sequence. YouTube is a prime example of a digital interface because it works best

by breaking down. For instance, if the ads you see acutely target and reflect your recent

150 It should be noted that even if these operations were also made transparent the effect would not necessarily be

diminished, but rather could possibly do the opposite. Kate Crawford and Mike Ananny have argued that holding

algorithms accountable through transparency could just as well result in the disclosing of so much information

that it only leads to further obfuscation, and in turn feed neoliberal models of agency where it is up to the

individual to wade through what it disclosed and determine whether or not to use the software or service. Mike

Ananny and Kate Crawford, “Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application

to algorithmic accountability,” New Media & Society, 20, no. 3, (2016): 973-989.

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browsing history, suspicions of surveillance and the invasion of privacy may arise, but at the

same time this also serves to reassert the accuracy of the algorithm, that it does what it, or

YOU, says. The erroneous result thus recedes back to the level of the possible, facilitating a

quasi-skepticism toward the algorithm by paradoxically making imprecision inevitably of

their “nature”; they must break down such that they do not becoming totalizing, or

totalitarian, structures.

5.6 The Inevitable-Image While images as actionable icons and semiotic signs are interfaces that do what they say by

representing algorithmic execution, so too are their results, the video clips we stream on

YouTube. What do they appear to represent, what do they interface? In a chapter of The

Interface Effect, Galloway examines the debate in critical theory around the possibilities of

representing power and violence in contemporary society, concluding that:

We must simply describe today’s mode of production in its many divergent details: the diffusion of

power into distributed networks, the increase in local autonomous decision making, the ongoing

destruction of the social order at the hands of industry, the segmentation and rationalization of minute

gestures within daily life, the innovations around unpaid micro labor, the monetization of affect and the

“social graph,” the entrainment of universalizing behaviors within protocological organization – these

are the things that are unrepresentable [...] The point of unrepresentability is the point of power. And the

point of power today is not in the image. The point of power today resides in networks, computers,

algorithms, information, and data. Some may deny this last point, yet it is impossible to deny it and

remain a materialist.151

Galloway is explicitly referring to the manner in which distributed networks of information

have only so far been represented in one way, as visualizations of the space of flows between

nodal points. However, while he may be correct in this regard, it seems to us that images,

particularly as disseminated on YouTube, are precisely the way in which the contemporary

mode of production represents itself, or simulates, self-representation. What we will discuss

now is that the image matters, in that power mobilizes images which mobilize it turn, because

it does not matter at all.

Vectoral third nature certainly emerges alongside mass media and the culture industry,

wherein capital, the circulation of commodities and property, also came to be circulated

151 The Interface Effect, 92.

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through images, or what Guy Debord called the spectacle. The spectacle is the stream of

images detached from everyday life that projects the world as sheer appearance. It is a

representation of society that simultaneously presents itself as the reality of society, as both

the project and result of the capitalist mode of production. As such, the “spectacle is not a

collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”152 For

Debord, the spectacle had three historical phases: the concentrated, diffuse and integrated

spectacles. In the first instance, the spectacle was concentrated around a central image,

characterized by totalitarian and fascist regimes, such as Stalin being the figurehead of the

USSR. This came to be replaced by the diffuse spectacle, where endless commodities could

be produced and pictured, competing against each other while still constituting a false unity

reproducing the capitalist worldview as unquestionable.153 Its axiom was, “what appears is

good, what is good appears.”154 Finally, the integrated spectacle comprises both of the former

modes, wherein concentration centers around an unknowable, occult figure, and diffusion can

capture any social practice and behavior. In this “spectacular government”, media status,

Debord writes, “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might

actually be capable of doing, it is normal for this status to be readily transferable; for anyone,

anywhere, to have the same right to the same kind of stardom.”155

One would not be wrong to think that what Debord is describing here is YouTube. Of

course, he died right when the internet and computational technology were becoming

increasingly prominent forces in contemporary life and a decade before YouTube would even

be launched. Yet, it demonstrates that the seeds of a spectacular regime in which “a financier

can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be

president…” were already there as society became characterized by control and an

informational mode of production.156 Debord’s comments on the value of media status echo

Citton’s insights that in our current attention ecology visibility is indispensable, as well as our

elaboration on how visibility as simulated transparency is an integral technique of power on

YouTube.

It is necessary to stress here that the incitement to upload YOUrself to YouTube

emerges out of the history of attention and the archaeology of the spectacle. Yves Citton

152 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2004), 7. 153 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990),

5-6.

154 Ibid., 10. 155 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 6. 156 Ibid.

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stresses in particular, Gabriel Tarde, Georg Franck, Jonathan Beller and Jonathan Crary as

theorists of this. Crary has analyzed the transformations since the 19th century in how

reconfigurations of capitalism “continually push attention to new limits and thresholds, with

an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information…”

to capture our attention and regulate our perceptions.157 These technologies of attention

emerge not only with mass media, but also, for instance, in the arrival of the assembly line,

which required workers to have degrees of alertness to their repetitive tasks. In turn, the

subsequent massification of the population into consumers of these products prompted the

birth of marketing and advertising industries to capture that collective attention.158 YouTube’s

attention ecology, however, is as much about the platform paying attention to the user in order

to command, collect and commodify their attention.

Citton stresses that one must account for the ways in which contemporary capitalism's

informational mode of production have conditioned the functioning of attention, but also how

attention affects it in turn. For Citton, “attentional capitalism” is becoming its hegemonic

form. This form precedes from an “ontology of visibility” in which the existence of things is

measured by quantity and quality of attention paid to it, prompting a need for notoriety. When

seeing produces an object's signification, to be afforded attention is to be valorized.159

Building on Georg Franck, Citton considers the importance of prominence within these

attention regimes. Celebrities, he suggests, we consider the capitalists of this attention regime,

while the mediasphere functions in the manner of a bank. Attention can be invested according

to a financial logic of speculation, hedging and risk since they can circulate prominent entities

to gain attention revenue while also promoting less popular forms through its power of

ensnarement. Attention can only become a currency, however, if it can be homogenized and

standardized.160 For instance, “x amount of engagement on a YouTube video = x amount of

attention revenue”. We should understand this system of equivalence in terms of what we

have called a digital relation.

Prominence on YouTube is located in several places. YouTube stars, for instance, are

users that have gained a significant amount of views and subscribers such that their videos can

be monetized, where revenue is split between YouTube and content creators/providers. These

users reflect the circulation of popular content on YouTube, for if a major news story hits,

157 Jonathan Crary. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1999), 13–14. 158 Citton, 14. 159 Ibid., 45-47. 160 Ibid., 51-53.

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they will have some sort of video response. They also inflect forms of content, for if they

propagate certain views, products or genres, these will influence the production and

viewership of further content. This role is also fulfilled by advertisers, brands and

corporations, as they can pay to promote their content at the top of searches, before and after

videos, and even during, by virtue of interrupting the stream or sponsoring content creators’

videos. These factors, alongside the algorithmic relations of the database and social relations

of the diffuse mediasphere, function to standardize and homogenize, to digitize, both the form

and content of videos on YouTube.

Taking up the critique of the spectacle, Wark has demonstrated that since Debord’s

death, the contemporary landscape of third nature has integrated the spectacle to the point of

its disintegration, “in which the spectator gets to watch the withering away of the old order,

ground down to near nothingness by its own steady divergence from any apprehension of

itself.”161 What this entails is that the spectacle has become so overflooded with images of

every aspect of the world, that it even represents its various destructions, whether of war and

the welfare state, financial and environmental collapse, genocide et al. What it cannot

conceive or countenance, however, is its own end. It must continually recycle itself. Images

are no longer primarily produced and distributed by any centralized, or decentralized, “culture

industries”, but by the distribution of unpaid user/consumer/producers who in their leisure

entertain one and other in the manner that spectacle used to. From this surplus of images, the

new “vulture industries” extract value like “algorithms that manage databases of images that

consumers swap between each other”.162 This should remind us all too well of our analysis of

YouTube. What is implicit here are the dual poles of repetition and representation integral to

the history of attention and the spectacle. Attention is bound to capture and repetition as a

mode of habituation to a representation of reality. Chun stresses how update dulls us to the

new. Of course, it can only do so insofar as it is experienced as a novel spectacle that is

instantly archived and forgotten only to return out of time and space in a repetition caught

between regeneration and degeneration. What Wark’s description further evokes is this

specter of death that haunts this spectacle in both content and form. These images spread by

disintegrating, seemingly dead on arrival, ready to be scavenged by vultures. This is the effect

of the inevitable-image, of an endlessly accumulating, assortment of clips that simulate the

161 McKenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20tn Century (London:

Verso, 2013), 3. 162 Ibid., 6.

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same executable algorithmic sequence of request, relation, result, into the possible, probable,

inevitable.

5.7 Matters of Life and Death While we have discussed how YouTube emerges out of the history of the spectacle, the

informatization of the capitalist mode of production and the larger shift from discipline to

control, these changes are themselves inseparable from the emergence of biopower and

biopolitics. Foucault named biopower as that which takes biological life itself as its object in

order to “make live” and “let die”. The technology of biopower addresses multiplicities of

people as a mass. It deals with the population as political problem to be controlled, as a matter

of biopolitics, by taking statistical measurements of factors that universally affect the

population, namely, rates of birth, death, fertility, production, accidents, anomalies and

infirmities, etc.163 Elaborating on Foucault, Deleuze writes that biopolitics is the moment that

“making something probable” becomes a category of power through methods that measure

probability.164 Already here we can glimpse the ways in which this has been implemented into

YouTube, for what is the reduction of life into informational patterns that can be predicted if

not an algorithmic process?

Much like the disciplinary individual, information about populations is made an object

of knowledge through the archivization of these measurements and statistics for purposes of

optimization and effectivization. Where discipline “trained” individual bodies, biopower

regulates life in its generality. What is common to both these regimes is the circulation of “the

norm”.165 However, the disciplinary archive was more about registration, of making the

individual visible while its mechanisms were to be seamless and thus invisible. By contrast, in

order to cover the global mass of the population the biopolitical archive is an apparatus of

administration with a greater degree of publicity.166 Here too, we can grasp how the

biopolitical serves as a condition for the cultivation of computational technologies aimed at

the recording, processing and production of life into informational code. YouTube is

163 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, trans. David

Macey, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003), 241-243. 164 Foucault, 72. 165 Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, 244-247; 253. 166 This was why techniques of biopower incited people to “confess their sex” in the 17th century. It had to be

verbalized for it had to be managed in order to be a utility for the population. The History of Sexuality Vol.1: An

Introduction, 24-26.

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undoubtedly situated within this regime, for as we have seen, it incites YOU to broadcast

yourself to its platform so you can be seen by yourself, others and advertisers.

Earlier we discussed how Galloway regarded protocol to be of the order of second

nature on account of its vitalization of information. For this reason, he considers it to

correspond not only to control, but to biopower and biopolitics, for “the same protocological

forces that regulate data flows within contingent environments such as distributed networks

are the same forces that regulate matter itself.”167 As stated, life here is defined as an anti-

entropic force, conserving information from living being to being in the form of genes and

memes (as cultural genetics). A similar position is taken by Pasi Väliaho who actively links

this anti-entropic force to images, stating they can function as modes of power and

subjectification by virtue of being living entities that spread bacterially between our minds,

bodies and screens, eradicating any distinction between the environments of nature and

appearance.168 The intersection between screen-based media, their images and our bodies

constitutes a “biopolitical visual economy” wherein images function as a mode of biopower

that shapes the social body according to a neoliberal governmentality of free-market finance

and perpetual warfare.169 While Väliaho provides fruitful insight into the relations between

the image, the military-industrial-entertainment complex and neoliberal management of life,

his narrow focus on first-person shooter games and military, virtual reality technology risks

obfuscating the fact that the image is most commonly interfaced today as a ubiquitous

banality thanks to technologies like YouTube. In fact, what we are trying to say is that it is

therein that they matter most, both as affective and effective material forces.

The proliferation and propagation of images on YouTube can make videos viral, or as

Väliho states, spread like vital bacteria. Yet, as we have argued, algorithms can only engender

life to this extent via their own degeneration, on the basis of an archiviolithic death drive.

Algorithmic update does not simply “allow” death, it quite literally, executes it. To execute

firstly means to “follow out” a sequence. Just as images are made to live through the openness

of possibility, they are opened up to finitude, to death. The effect of inevitability engendered

167 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 110. 168 His primary example concerns how virtual reality technology is used by the military in order to modulate that

affective capacities of soldiers as a form of treating both PTSD and habituating them to act on the reptilian

impulse of fight or flight. This then feeds into the world of entertainment through video games such as first-

person shooters, where the same affects and effects are triggered so that an average gamer becomes a soldier

subject. Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2016), xii. 169 Ibid., 1-25.

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by algorithmic power entails a sequence that has a beginning, a middle and an, inevitable, end

in order to restart.

In his reworking of Foucault’s concept, Achille Mbembe stresses how contemporary

biopower and biopolitics are as contingent upon making live as it is upon the right to kill, as a

sovereignty based on “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the

material destruction of human bodies and populations.”170 Since biopolitics is invested in

taking control of life and making it productive, death in all its guises (physical, political,

juridical) has to be justified, which Foucault located in the exercise of racism. Race in this

case means primarily not ethnicity, but species and the subdividing of people into groups,

splitting populations between “one” and “the other”. Biopolitics as such allows that which

does not benefit the health of the race, species or population to die.171 Mbembe brings this

aspect to the forefront of biopower in order to argue that late modern sovereignty defends the

life of its society through not just allowing, but administering the death of its explicitly,

ethnically racialized enemies. The aim is total destruction, the enemy must be vanquished

regardless of civilian casualties or infrastructural damage, creating “death-worlds” inhabited

by people who attain the status of “living dead”.172 Contemporary biopower/biopolitics is as

such also a matter of necropower and necropolitics wherein there is a “subjugation of life to

the power of death.”173 Mbembe’s concept pertains in the first hand to warfare and

postcolonial occupation, however, his insights should be just as relevant for media studies as

the concepts of biopower/biopolitics have been. To connect necropower to media theory is to

stress the inseparability of the social and the technical as political technologies, that social

forms of domination and technical operations both reciprocally produce and reproduce each

other. For if computation has invigorated the biopolitical regulation of life, we must also

highlight its investments into the necropolitical exercising of death. In the case of YouTube,

which forms of life are made to matter and appear by its dispositif’s regime of visibility and

which are not? When life is coded into 0s and 1s, who is discounted from either?

It may seem trivial or even careless to connect the self-effacement of algorithms to

actual death and destruction caused by warfare or structural violence, however, what we want

to elucidate are the ways in which these social relations are inscribed into YouTube and

regurgitated back into the world. As Jackie Wang has elucidated, algorithmic predictions have

170 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15, no. 1, (Winter, 2003): 14. 171 Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, 80-83; 254-257. 172 Mbembe, 25-30; 39-40. 173 Ibid., 39-40.

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been used to detect supposed crime booms within African-American communities on the

basis of which policies, like harsher sentencing laws, have been justified and implemented.174

Wang stresses, as well as Safiya Noble and Kate Crawford, that such algorithms are not

neutral, their categorizations are embedded, firstly, within social structures of domination.175

Moreover, Mbembe’s theorization has been expanded by Manuel Abreu to illustrate

how Big Data also functions as a basis for violence and algorithmic necropower, as evidenced

by an NSA director’s quote that they “kill people based on metadata.”176 Abreu calls the

manner in which algorithms predict based on quasi-correlation in datasets and patterns,

borrowing Derrida’s definition of justice, a “calculation of the incalculable”.177 Algorithms

cannot extricate any real causes within the data it interprets, but bypasses causation by

discerning and presenting “non-obvious associations” as a rule. Such analyses of data have

become increasingly forensic, used instead of, or as, evidence of suspicious or non-normative

activity on which it can act. The fodder for this aspect of necropolitics are our daily, banal

activities online; “[a]lgorithmic necropower defers the act of killing and disperses

complicity.”178 It is this last point, how algorithms render banality a form of destruction by the

dispersion of complicity, or the habituation to the archiviolithic, that is vital to understanding

YouTube’s necropolitical infrastructure and effect of inevitability.

Since the algorithmically generated and governed images, what I propose we call

algorimages, can ostensibly represent anything that is collected within YouTube’s database,

which ostensibly contains everything, that which does not appear is not merely excluded, but

effectively does not exist in any meaningful sense. As Henry Jenkins puts it in regard to

participatory and convergence culture, “if it doesn’t spread, its dead.”179 At the same time it

spreads, however, it is already dead, it will inevitably be forgotten, only to reappear and

disappear all over again. Perhaps then, algorimages are undead, or living dead. As viruses and

bacteria propagate at the cost of infection, images latch onto material hosts, both technical

devices and physical bodies, deteriorating as they spread. They are a pharmakon, which in

Derrida’s reading is both poison and cure.180 Algorimages are specters haunting a zone of

174 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 47. 175 Ibid., 48-49. See also Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New

York: NYU Press, 2018); YouTube, “The Trouble with Bias - NIPS 2017 Keynote - Kate Crawford

#NIPS2017”, accessed May 22, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk 176 Manuel Abreu, “Incalculable Loss,” The New Inquiry, August 19, 2014, accessed May 22, 2019,

https://thenewinquiry.com/incalculable-loss/ 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid. 179 Henry Jenkins, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes,” henryjenkins.org,

accessed May 22, 2019, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html 180 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), 70.

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indecision, an interface between biopower and necropower, constituting, to borrow Judith

Butler’s terminology, a “grid of cultural intelligibility” that establishes a normative way of

seeing in which their sequence and what it represents comes to cohere and be categorized.181

The algorimage is fundamentally a matter of political visibility.

To conclude this section, I would like to provide an example of this interfacial power

over life and death that resides in the algorimage as an attempt to concretize what we have

been discussing. In 2014, a video was captured that showed the murder of Eric Garner, an

African-American man, at the hands of two NYPD officers for allegedly selling loose

cigarettes. The video was quickly spread on social media, primarily YouTube (but also

Twitter and Facebook) where it quickly amassed millions of views. Through YouTube the

video was able to circulate and spread at a tremendous pace, resulting in equally massive

outrage and reaction. Much of it stemmed from, and was subsumed into, the burgeoning

Black Lives Matter movement, which subsequently organized street marches and protests

against structural injustice directed against African-Americans by the US police apparatus,

calling for the indictment of the officers. YouTube provided a means to communicate these

issues to larger number of people, calling attention to this violence by making it visible to

those who do not experience, or are not exposed to it, whether in or outside the United States.

It demonstrated the informatic power implicated within YouTube by using its spectacle to

bear witness to injustice. However, the officers were not indicted (it took until last year for

them to be investigated in a mere disciplinary hearing), and even more videos documenting

African-Americans murdered by police followed, Michael Brown in Ferguson and Philando

Castile in Minnesota to name only a couple.182

Eventually, Eric Garner’s murder became merely a clip in the larger collection of clips

that is YouTube’s ecology of finitude. The video is a janus-faced mirror simulating life and

death, wherein the life of the racialized African-American body finds its representation at the

point of its twofold death. YouTube made it possible for the video to engender protest, but it

also engendered its degradation into digital detritus. Like all viral videos, its fame was finite,

but unlike so many others, what was being overwritten was not something funny or cute, but

an instance of political violence.

181 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 194. 182 Jamiles Lartley, ““This is your last chance for Justice”: Eric Garner’s family wants NYPD officer fired,” The

Guardian, News, July 18, 2018, accessed May 22, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/eric-

garner-family-want-nypd-officers-fired

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Every second YouTube screens the slow death of something, whether it is racially subjugated

black lives, this or that news story about the destruction of our planet, perpetual war in Syria

with untold civilian casualties, or mass shootings, bringing them into the light until they are

overexposed, blacked out and forgotten only to enter the cycle again and again; YouTube is a

palimpsest of the perpetual presence of absence in spectacular banality. Media matters most

when they no longer are new as Chun highlights, and the power of the image is that it never

really has any power, it is simply there, unavoidable, inevitable. What Debord saw in the

spectacle was that appearance was all that mattered, however, today the situation might rather

be that the spectacle of disintegration is just as characterized by disappearance. Just as

attention payed to one clip on YouTube distracts you from another, so too does that which

appears hide that which disappears. It habituates us to the aesthetics of (dis)appearance and

de-regeneration, which is simultaneously the necropolitics and necropower of the algorimage.

This visual ecology of finitude is embedded within every stream of a video. The image may

not be the point of power today, but it is a point in power that mediates between other points.

It is an interface.

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6. YouTube is YOU Too: User,

Processing, Subjectification

The final chapter of our analysis of YouTube proceeds from the user layer, which at first

glance might strike us as different from the previous chapters in that there is no technical

device that serves as the base through which we navigate the larger theme, in this case

subjectification. This is only correct to a certain extent, for what we will attempt to examine

here is the ways in which users of YouTube are not simply humans, but also machines and the

machinic, and just as importantly, neither are static positions, but rather dynamic processes.

6.1 User-Subject-Machine The YouTube user is necessarily machinic, encapsulating the human and non-human, the

social and the technical. The user is a process, an effect of protocological, algorithmic

executions where these processes are affected in turn. This dual-processing, effectively,

renders one both a YouTube user and subject. The modern social theory of the subject

conceives of it not as some pre-given, ontological category, but as Hardt & Negri stress, a

social process of generation that occurs within certain institutional places.183 Disciplinary

power, as we have seen, produced the discrete individual subject as an effect by acting on

people as objects within various sites (factory, school, prison). The passage into the society of

control, however, reconfigures the space of this generation from the mold, independent

variables which the individual passed through starting from zero each time, to the modulation

of inseparable, digital variables.184 The production of subjectivities is no longer confined

within separate institutions, for control has collapsed the walls of the disciplinary institutions

such that the “immanent exercise of discipline–that is, the self-disciplining of subjects” has

not disappeared but intensified both in place and form.”185 The inside and outside, public and

private, are no longer separated but interwoven, generalized and digitized. Where mass

industry hinged on standardized production and various standardized users, the situation in the

contemporary informational economy with its abundant interfacial interactions, Bratton

highlights, is such that “platforms with access to each User’s specific profile (previous search

183 Hardt & Negri, 195-196. 184 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 185 Hardt & Negri,195-197; 330.

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history, purchases, geographic location, circle of friends) can hypersegment services and

content.”186 Each person’s profile in turn creates a distinct user persona, such that one’s

subjectivity corresponds not to a simple set of standards like student, patient, prisoner, but is

hyper-individuated and encoded on the basis of one’s simultaneous relation to other personas.

These other user-subjects are not simply other humans, but as Bratton stresses, non-human

agents like machines and artificial intelligence.187

These machine users are “almost any kind of automation or machinic process”, and in

our case this means technical, hardware devices as well as software.188 As such, the

algorithms and protocols in YouTube’s database and interface are themselves users, in fact

they are essential for the human user to be enveloped into the platform at all. Human users

provide YouTube’s database with indexed information, but for this to have any bearing on the

platform’s functionality algorithmic users are required to process this information within its

own protocological language parameters. The agency of these machinic users is highlighted

by the various discourses on the role of “bots” on YouTube. Bots are forms of artificial

intelligence most commonly used to inflate view counts and engagements with videos. This

has been a problem for YouTube since the platform started becoming more and more

lucrative and people realized that exposure meant valorization and monetization. Swathes of

companies sprung up that in return for certain fees programmed bots that would stream,

comment and rate their clients’ videos. Many YouTubers, especially those who have enjoyed

some modicum of success, complained about the bias of being able to purchase prominence,

without noting the irony that this pay for play is also being implicated within the advertising

and algorithmic economies that make the financialization of their content possible. This

outcry lead YouTube to take measures for uprooting these pestilent “bot-anical” gardens

through proprietary detection software as part of, in the words of a YouTube spokesperson,

“our long-standing effort to keep YouTube authentic, we periodically audit the views a video

has received and validate the video’s view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence

comes to light.”189 The language used here underscores our points about the axis of power

with regimes of visibility and transparency on YouTube. Inflated view counts are “fraudulent”

as if videos not viewed by bots were “true” and naturally reflective of the number of users

devoting their individual attention and information as a purely personal, “rational” decision.

186 Bratton, 255. 187 Ibid., 274-279. 188 Ibid., 279. 189 Paris Martineau, “Inside YouTube’s Fake Views Economy,” The Outline, accessed May 22, 2019,

https://theoutline.com/post/3804/inside-youtube-s-fake-views-economy?zd=1&zi=bzh2dosr

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The “artifice” of this artificial intelligence has also made been significant fodder for the

narrative of the rise of “fake news” and the “alt-right”, with political pundits and media-class

commentators decrying phony user bots aiding content creators in disseminating radical

messaging, such as in the case of Alex Jones and his Infowars channel.190 This also feeds

discourses on filter bubbles and bias, or the way algorithms segregate and segment users so

dramatically that even if two users search for the same thing, based on their search histories

and preferences, the results in each case can be different. It might be possible, even probable,

that channels like Infowars and others on the “alt-right” may be using bots to attract attention

and that algorithms are directing this information in certain directions, but this in isolation

tells us nothing about why and how these videos spread in the space and pace that they do. In

fact, it willfully obfuscates and rejects the complex network of constituent parts, the

dispositif, that transmit these processes and set their parameters, and only reifies the conceit

of the individual (read: human) actor being behind every click.

For one, insofar these bots are automated to increase views for a video by simulating

human users, they also point to the manner in which human users are processed as becoming-

bots by the entanglement of forces within YouTube’s dispositif. For the platform, a human

user is equivalent to the non-human users in the sense that they all function as markers of the

value of visibility. The same goes for advertisers who are integrated into the platform by

connecting and commodifying videos, influencing YouTube’s output. Secondly, and most

significantly, bots are only one constituent user/subject of YouTube’s socio-technical

machinery, it is the entire composition of human and non-human users that engenders a

consistency of visibility and enunciation such that every view, statement, click, and comment

can generate results that reflects YOU as a user. The power executed by the command of

continual update is such that it simultaneously inflects the representation of the user. It is not

the work of foreign agent bots that covertly imbue you with some false consciousness, nor

should we simply say that it is the hardware and software technics of either neutral or

ideological algorithms that control everything, but these things in conjunction, and

disjunction, enmeshed into relations that compose YouTube’s socio-technical machine

190 Dan Seitz, “Pizzagate Spread Largely Thanks To Twitter Bots, YouTube, Alex Jones, And Tech's Aversion

To Responsibility,” Yahoo, accessed May 22, 2019, https://news.yahoo.com/pizzagate-spread-largely-thanks-

twitter-

184341968.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=

AQAAAJHKCs_SezUwZeDHLJ15K7r7J0QQGZR8L-e8rBmi-XoTQj0tnV4r5t3-

Jjwpz05eP2BQaZK0hSHYC7zxighVxWiS5T8UyZ-cTNBJWyrPkPMUAWVZKfjbyc-

RPnn_bD9d4s4q0qlFPibg4Znrp-9C-y1oSrSw4LIEAOG0UhDXp-pe

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deployed within the diagram of control. In short, it is YouTube’s derivative, digital dispositif

that makes you in its image, which already resembled YOU.

6.2 Machinic Surplus Between 0 and 1 A decade prior to the “Postscript…” Deleuze, along with Guattari, was already sketching the

passage into control societies through a discussion of capitalism’s formation of subjects. What

Deleuze and Guattari saw was that capitalism and the birth of the modern state inaugurated

new mechanisms for subjectification characterized by the dual poles of social subjection and

machinic enslavement. Machinic enslavement entails that human beings compose “among

themselves and other things (animals, tools),” a relational machine “under the control and

direction of a higher unity.”191 Subjection, on the other hand, happens when this higher unity

“constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object [...] no longer a

component of a machine but a worker, a user.”192 In the former instance, subjects are enslaved

by a machine of which they are an internal force, whereas in the latter, they are subject to the

force of an external machine. We may spontaneously think here that YouTube is such an

exterior object since it makes us simultaneously users and workers who provide it with

information. However, for this reason, we also see that this position is not reducible to

YouTube’s exterior technics for users are required to co-create the platform in relation to the

technical. This leaves us with the problem of locating this “higher unity” that either directs

and subjects users to YouTube or to which users are directed and enslaved.

Machinic enslavement arises first in what Deleuze and Guattari call the archaic

imperial state, in which everything that is produced is public and land is communal but united

under the sign of a despot serving as the transcendent source and eminent owner of the

community. Social subjection arises out of private ownership and the transformation of social

relations into personal dependencies, as such it was present in both ancient slavery and feudal

serfdom, however, it emerged fully with the birth of capitalism and the modern State.193

Social subjection under capitalism involves organizing people and things in processes of

individuation and identity, meaning that our subjectivities are to be both of discrete

individuals and assigned roles, such as “student”, “worker”, “prisoner” etc. These are the

standardized “machine parts” Hardt and Negri (as well as Bratton) located within modern

191 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 456-457. 192 Ibid., 457. 193 Ibid., 427-428; 451-452.

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institutions and large-scale industrial production, each fulfilling a function in the “assembled

machine” and so wholly “replaceable with any part of its type.”194 These machines were

primarily motorized and thermodynamic technical machines to which one was subjected,

whether that was the machine of the automobile factory or the car produced by it. What

Deleuze and Guattari presciently observed was that technological development coupled with

capitalism’s increasingly worldwide enterprise was reinvesting enslavement into subjection

by making it immanent to itself rather than through a transcendent unity. This third age is, as

we have already seen in the discussion of control, that of the computer, of “cybernetic and

informational machines that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and

reversible “humans-machines systems” [...] based on internal, mutual communication, and no

longer on usage or action.”195 This “generalized regime” renders technical machines that were

particular and mechanistic, properly machinic and digital, such that the interior and exterior

become co-intensive and co-extensive. Production is no longer tied to the body and

temporality of the human worker, but of the machine assemblage such that “surplus value

becomes machinic” and “there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information,

some of which are mechanical, others human.”196 This has fundamentally shifted the nature of

labor, for in machinic enslavement one is always available to be productive by virtue of being

divided into several machinic assemblages and complex qualitative processes like “the media,

the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling–every semiotic system.”197

In his own elaboration of this strand in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, Maurizio

Lazzarato stresses that capitalism is just as dependent on flows of signs (of which machinic

enslavement and social subjection are distinct regimes), as it is money and labor as conditions

for production. Social subjection is a signifying semiotics, it mobilizes, primarily through

language, the production of “meaning, significations, interpretations, discourse, and

representations…” to constitute individuated subjects.198 Machinic enslavement is

characterized by an asignifying semiotics, which acts on material flows “whether they signify

something for someone or not” by “putting to work and multiplying the power of the

"productive" assemblage.”199 Algorithms and protocols fall into this category as they execute

commands for a technical device to run, constituting its input and output parameters.

194 Hardt & Negri, 331. 195 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 458. 196 Ibid., 458. 197 Ibid., 492. 198 Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivities, trans. Joshua

David Jordan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 39. 199 Ibid., 40.

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Asignifying semiotics are crucial to capitalism because they “depoliticize and depersonalize”

social relations as “forms of "automatic" evaluation and measurement and [...] make

"formally" equivalent heterogeneous spheres of asymmetrical force and power by integrating

them into and rationalizing them for economic accumulation.”200 Think of YouTube’s

technical infrastructure, how its algorithms “automatically” interpret, relate and integrate all

the various forces and flows of information, from human, non-human, common and corporate

users as codes in a database processed through the same executive command. This is not just

an imperative for YouTube’s machine to function, but for YouTube to produce machinic

surplus value in the larger machinery of the information economy. Lazzarato elaborates on

how the signifying semiotics of “the media, politicians, and experts are mobilized in order to

legitimate, support, and justify in the eyes of individuated subjects, their consciousness and

representations…”.201 In this sense we can see that YouTube by virtue of being a node in the

mass media network, where anybody and anything can ostensibly be made visible and

represented, supplements its asignifying machinic enslavement through its own signifying

semiotics of the inevitable-image, projecting, as Lazzarato puts it, “the fact that "there is no

alternative."”202

6.3 Dividual Divides into YOU We can now more readily assess Deleuze’s definition of the dividual. The dividual is a code

transmuting from browser to website, to app, to Internet-connected home appliances, through

smart grids and continuous networks. Name and number are now numerous usernames,

passwords, profile pictures, anonymous posts, and search histories being processed and

related alongside any number of market segments, message boards, friend groups, fanbases.

In their analysis of the passage to the global control society they call “empire”, Hardt

and Negri locate several symptomatic effects, primarily, that the binary structures of

domination that characterized modern sovereignty are being replaced by a new paradigm that

has absorbed the critique leveled against it by post-structuralist and postcolonial theories of

difference and marginal social identities, by proclaiming “Long live difference! Down with

essentialist binaries!”203 This is most clearly reflected in marketing where “hybrid and

differentiated populations present a proliferating number of “target markets” that can each be

200 Lazzarato., 41. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Hardt & Negri, 138.

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addressed by “specific marketing strategies” such that every “difference is an opportunity.”204

If we consider the case of YouTube this seems to us to be a particularly poignant insight. In

YouTube’s dispositif myriad lines of subjectification may divide you into a viewer of liberal,

late-night talk shows, interested in power tools, a fan of K-Pop, and host a cooking show on a

media startup company’s channel. This particular user profile may change from day-to-day, or

hour-to-hour even, in terms of what you are “interested” in searching for and viewing. In

accordance, marketing match-makes you with personalized advertisements, as YouTube

allows ad agencies to gain access to analytics and target specific user segments.205 When

coupled with YouTube’s technique of transparency it becomes evident that YouTube thrives

on the diversity of inputs.

Dividual users are hypersegmented and hyperindivuated, but perhaps not into a

disciplinary field of comparison to norms, but rather a field of relation undulating on

homogenous, “trending” waves. To quote Deleuze, “surfing has already replaced the older

sports”.206 This is what Dominic Pettman calls hypermodulation, where the infographics of

the mediasphere function like a “digital mood ring” that is “customizable, searchable,

reconfigurable, filterable” and provides “a four-dimensional mirror in which to catch our

reflection: a massselfie of four billion people at once, ever changing, yet with the same frozen

smile (or grimace).”207 Herein every dividual is imaged. As a YouTube user, for instance,

whether or not you have an account your profile is still pictured. If you do have an account,

you may choose an avatar for your user image, this may be of yourself, or anyone and

anything else. This could be random, pixelated abstraction or something as well-known as a

picture of Karl Marx, which, regardless of how public it may be, becomes personalized.

Moreover, if you do not choose any specific image you are rendered as a white, animated

silhouette of a person in different colored backgrounds. What is imaged in each instance is the

generic, hyper-individuation of the dividual user. It must be stressed that personalization does

not simply entail that no two users see the same things on YouTube. The videos that that

appear are precisely the ones that have been seen and engaged with by others. Personalization

is never personal but is imaged as such.

It is no wonder that for Deleuze, the serpent is the animal that exemplifies the manner

of living and relating under control.208 The subjectivity of the dividual coils itself into

204 Hardt & Negri, 152. 205 YouTube, “YouTube Advertising,” accessed May 22, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ads/ 206 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 207 Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 63. 208 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5.

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feedback loops, shedding its skin as its slinks through the porous spaces of control to the

command of continual update. The de- and regeneration of algorimages produces, just as

much as they are produced by, the dividual’s “fluid process of generation and corruption of

subjectivity.”209 It is interesting to note the way in which YouTube functions to reterritorialize

this dividuation into YOU. In Deleuze’s description of the dispositif, subjectivity is produced

as “a process of individuation that bears on groups and on people, and is subtracted from the

power relations which are constituted as forms of knowledge: a sort of surplus-value.”210 It is,

precisely, this subtraction from the axis of power/knowledge, pitching the subject as an

independent point where value is located, that is relevant to understanding YouTube’s

production of subjectivity.

Everything that is generated and appears does so as a representation of YOU rather

than the collective composition of clicks, hence, YouTube. This picturing of user as producer

of the networks they are within, Chun succinctly states, works to “counteract concerns over

code as law as police by positing YOU as the sovereign subject, YOU as the decider.”211 This

has significant implications for understanding the YouTube user-subject. In the interface

between subjects and the spectacle of disintegration, every algorimage is made equivalent. As

Pettman elaborates, “matters of potentially historic import, like a civil rights issue, for

instance, are now flattened into the same homogeneous, empty digital space as a cute critter or

an obnoxious celebrity (and vice versa).”212 This leads to a cognitive dissonance by which

these radically opposed images and our reactions to them, being appalled at injustice or

amused by the cat, are made wholly compatible as they enter into a digital relation.213

Effectively, this cognitive dissonance is lodged within YOU, or in other words, algorithms

execute the orders of the individual rather than YouTube’s ecology of finitude and the

necropolitical social. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has analyzed how the speed and surplus at which

information is produced and proliferated, coupled with an economic sphere competing for

various forms of attention, has engendered an increase in both individual and collective

feelings of panic and depression. Panic, he defines as the feeling of complete overwhelm at

the excess of informational stimuli that passes through us and which we feel the need to keep

up with. When this ubiquity reaches unbearable heights, one may collapse and detach from

this flow into feelings of depression as “a process of demotivation, originated by the loss of an

209 Hardt & Negri,197. 210 “What is a dispositif?,” 161. 211 Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 84. 212 Pettman, 64. 213 Ibid., 66.

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object that used focus of narcissistic attention for the subject.”214 This is significant because

what appears as well as disappears is rendered personal. If only one had gotten more attention,

paid more attention, or helped call attention to and communicated information about a cause.

Everything points to the fact that YOU matter, yet, in the end what one also sees is that YOU

don’t matter enough.

Action and inaction, attention and distraction become proxies for their political

counterparts. To return to the algorimage of Eric Garner’s murder, it was important, arguably,

necessary to upload it to YouTube because it so rapidly raised awareness and fueled activism

by, if only for a second, distracting people from cute cat videos. Yet, it was inevitably going

to be superseded by another coming distraction. This does not mean, of course, that the

movement itself was defused (Black Lives Matter, for instance, is as active as ever), however,

its moment in the center as a political issue was saturated to the point that, in the same manner

that it was recognized, dissolved into a algorithmic afterimage as opposed to continued

coverage. We know that what makes it possible for us to communicate information about such

matters of political and social import, making them “go viral” and vital, is also that which will

deteriorate it. This effect of transparency works against itself as its own limit. Or as Hito

Steyerl has elucidated, the explosion of visual representation through digital technologies

comes at the price of political representation being overshadowed by the economic interests of

marketing multiplicities, where “a growing number of unmoored and floating images

corresponds to a growing number of disenfranchized, invisible, or even disappeared and

missing people.”215 Algorimages are suicidal. One has to compete with impending defeat

under the force of the flow information in YouTube’s ecology of finitude and the control

society’s spectacle of disintegration. This is why it is so hard to effect real change through

YouTube; its participatory culture also involves participating in making certain things visible

over others in a seemingly endless cycle of attraction and distraction.

It seems to us that the diagnosis that societies of control are more conducive to

difference unmoored by essentialist binaries is correct up to a certain point. For is this really

difference that is being celebrated, or is it perhaps something else, something familiar? By the

same token as the individuation of the dividual, we can observe a user’s diverse interests and

habits not as an affirmation of difference, but a simultaneous construction and consolidation

of identity. We have already detailed how this works, to a certain extent, in regard to

214 Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Guiseppina

Mecchia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 100-102. 215 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 170-171.

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representation, wherein at every interfacial impasse you are confronted with inflected and

reflected traces of yourself. YouTube is not just a streaming platform, but a platform that

allows you to be seen and heard. If we consider YouTube’s production of power/knowledge

with its processes of subjectification, it becomes clearer how this works. The machinic,

dividual subject that is the YouTube user is constituted by a hybridity that only simulates

difference into an integrated digital fold. When Deleuze claims that the dividual is matter of

becoming-code, we should understand this as the embodiment of a digital difference, where

everything becomes commensurate regardless of disparity; YouTube was already YOUtube

before YOU typed it into YOUR browser. Another effect of this digitality is that algorimages

operate as signifying semiotics reasserting that any identity can ostensibly be represented

while obfuscating the forms of social domination that remain intact, as we have seen in regard

to the example of Eric Garner.

6.4 Common-ication: From YOU to MultiTube? This is not our fault. It is not the result of any individual actor, nor the master plan of central

point of command, but rather what Bratton calls an “accidental megastructure” of a

“planetary-scale”, including server farms, African oil mines, smart cities, and the gaseous

sphere of cloud computing, wherein you are constituted as a user-subject-machine of several

competing State and corporate sovereignties.216 It all but requires us to be connected to it

through some form of telecommunications signal and software processing. Going off the grid,

so to speak, does not make it disappear. It is not something one exits because it is in the

world, it processes and produces reality. This is why Citton stresses, as well Chun though in

different terminology, the transindividuality of our attention and user habits. YOUR clicks

and the cookie crumbs they leave behind may not even be yours, some other person may be

using your computer or phone, but nevertheless, this too becomes part of YOU. For while we

might be sitting, isolated, clicking and typing away at our devices, the information we

generate is necessarily connected by machine-to-machine, user-to-user communication, “it is

never an individual who thinks, never an individual who creates.”217 What matters is that

information is produced. However, this information is still supposed to be representative of

YOU, otherwise there would be no need for a username and password combination to be

distinctly yours; the dividual is recomposed as an individual. YouTube shows videos that are

216 Bratton, 5-13.

217 Lazzarato, 44.

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“recommended for YOU” not because of “what we have watched”, but “because YOU

watched”, therefore “YOU may also like”. This points to another significant sense in which

information is not YOUrs, namely, that YOU do not own it.

The reduction of information to commodity and property birthed a new vectoralist

class that own the vectors of its distribution, but Wark also identifies how this created their

class antagonists in those who produce the information they own, what he dubs the hacker

class. Hacker are not primarily computer hackers, though they are included in it, but rather

those who “hack” the virtual, making the possible, actual, and create something new in the

world, such as information, percepts, affects, sensations, relations etc.218 The hacker class is

as such disparate but their commonality is, precisely, the possibility of creating information

that is inherently common. Writes Wark, “To hack is to express knowledge in any of its

forms. Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning,

the gift of the result in a peer-to-peer network.”219

Paolo Virno has described how the informational ”post-Fordist” mode of production is

based on this “sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits” where one becomes a worker simply

through communication.220 This has fundamentally engendered a change in the nature of

labor, less defined by being congealed into any end product than providing informational

services that can ostensibly take place anywhere. This makes labor more akin to an artist’s

performance, or what Virno categorizes as virtuosity, because it finds it fulfillment in itself

while still requiring the presence of others to witness it.221 Virno relates this to Marx’s

concept of the general intellect, the point at which thought and the production of knowledge

becomes a public, social process and principal force of production.222 In other words, this is a

situation in which user cooperation, through their general capacity for communication and

production of information, is the primary measure of value.

The interests of the hacker class are fundamentally opposed to that of the vectoralists

because they realize that the productive force of information comes from it being available

and shareable rather than scarce and monopolized. A hack can transform information that has

become redundant and devalued into new forms of information, whether this is the

development of new software solutions for database storage, or simply repurposing and

218 A Hacker Manifesto, 14-15. 219 Ibid., 42. 220 It is important to note that this does not mean that the production of material goods and end products no

longer exists, but rather that more and more jobs are becoming service-based. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the

Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 41; 63. 221 Ibid., 52-56. 222 Ibid., 64.

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recontextualizing older content into new videos on YouTube. Here we see the positivity of the

negentropic, regenerative side of the cycle of algorithmic update, what has been forgotten

may reappear in new vibrant forms. This is, of course, constantly being countered by the

entropic forces of degeneration immanent to it, but also by the impositions of the property and

commodity form onto information. As a result, the production of information is deprived of

its equivocal status by replacing it with hierarchies of value.

As Virno elaborates, contemporary production is characterized by the labor of the

general intellect, or putting to work that which is common, constituting a public sphere

without a real “public”. The consequences of this is personal dependency and an “unchecked

proliferation of hierarchies.”223 On YouTube we can see how communicative sharing and

social cooperation instead becomes competitive servile work dependent on users to engage

and value other users and content, making some videos and users more visible and

monetizable than others for the purposes of extracting revenue. This makes the hacker class

susceptible and subservient to the vectoralists because by retaining copyrights and licensing

them to companies, or simply selling their intellectual property, hackers can also reap some of

the rewards. This is evident on YouTube in the aforementioned “stars” and content creators

that saturate the platform. These users are integral to YouTube’s business model and the

interests of the vectoralist class because their prominence means more attention and

information given to the platform which can be sold to advertisers for profit. These

hierarchies of content and users, producers and providers, as well as the representation of

relational metadata as individual identity, are spurred by the society of control’s ideal of

competition as a “motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs

through each, dividing each within.”224

The control of the circulation of content on YouTube extends itself even to that which

has explicitly been made for the purposes of sharing. When uploading a video that contains

“original” material not already copyrighted, YouTube provides the option of licensing it as

“Creative Commons” where one remains the “original author” but reserves the right for others

to remix, parody and distribute the video in and outside of YouTube so long as they credit

you.225 While fostering creative interaction, this is still based on individual ownership.

Despite not having the rights to creative commons video, by virtue of owning the means of

223 Virno., 41; 68. 224 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5.

225 Google, “YouTube Help: Creative Commons,” accessed May 22, 2019,

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en

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distribution and exposure, YouTube takes a 45% share of the revenue.226 YouTube also has

final say in what is published on their site, such that if they deem content unsuitable they may

remove or “unlist” videos. Even at its most accessible, YouTube is restrictive. Freedom is an

imperative for control, which is not really free at all.

However, the general intellect is the opening up a publicly organized and political

space where common affairs and political action can be engaged by the many, what Virno

terms (as do Hardt & Negri) the multitude. The multitude is not a “people” converged in a

State but the plural composition of singular individuals through “the individuation of the

universal, of the generic, of the shared experience.”227 This then is the struggle over

information as power on YouTube and in control societies, what it means for it to be common.

How can YouTube become a “MultiTube”? As the aim of this thesis is more acutely

diagnostic than prescriptive, we will not broach this question here other than to highlight its

urgency and perhaps point in the direction of further research.

What we have just discussed above characterizes the current state of the information

commons on YouTube. At their most “public”, videos are privatized and individualized, and

what is common is actually YOURS. This is to say that no matter how divided the dividual,

YouTube represents YOU as an individual. You are a producer of a product that is yourself.

226 Tim Peterson, “YOUTUBE TO TV NETWORKS: NO MORE 'SWEETHEART' AD DEALS FOR YOU!,”

Ad Age, accessed May 22, 2019. https://adage.com/article/digital/youtube-tv-sweetheart-ad-deals/245019 227 Virno, 21-25.

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7. Conclusion

In this thesis we have been analyzing the effects, in terms of the regimes of knowledge, power

and subjectification, produced by YouTube’s naturalization in, and of, contemporary life

through an examination of the technical and social forces and relations of production

immanent to its platform. In doing so we have analyzed YouTube as a machinic, digital

dispositif. To summarize our findings, it may be useful to recapitulate the Foucauldian-

Deleuzian definitions of the dispositif, that we have been utilizing and expanding upon, as the

network establishing regularity between heterogeneous elements composed of lines of

visibility, force, subjectification and splittage.

The lines of visibility and enunciation we located in the workings of YouTube’s

relational database. In short, these are the technical parameters, the programming language

MySQL, the Vitess software and the collaborative filtering algorithms that allow YOU to

make yourself visible through information inputs. This data is stored and processed into pools

of metadata, or databasins, wherein alongside content you are coded as a user profile with

certain platform preferences and histories in relation to other users and their activities. The

workings of the algorithms are then translated from code by HTTP and HTML protocols into

visible and legible images and texts that appear on YouTube’s interface to mediate a user’s

experience.

We identified the interface as the transmission point for the lines of force in the

dispositif, for what appears here incites you to make yourself visible. YouTube’s interface

represents the workings of its database into actionable images, where every click appears to

make things happen. This induces an effect that algorithms make results appear in accordance

with a user's actions, such that their operability is objective. Even if the results are faulty or

inaccurate in terms of how “related” they may be to your preferences, that they generate

output results based on input becomes inevitable; their form is naturalized as “fact”. This

produces what we have dubbed the inevitable-image, so named because what is imaged on the

interface is an execution of an algorithmic sequence of request, relation, result that moves

from possible, probable to inevitable. This inevitability is instantiated through the lines of

subjectification that produce the YouTube user as the apparent subject of this sequence, as the

individual who orders the algorithmic execution.

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However, as we have shown, this inevitable-image is not simply a product of YouTube’s

technics, but also an immanent social infrastructure. YouTube’s incitement to “broadcast

yourself” is inextricable from the societal shift to what Deleuze called societies of control,

characterized by the informatization of the capitalism’s mode of production into a global,

distributed network wherein the production of information has become dominant. In

accordance, an “attention economy” and diffuse “mediasphere” has arisen to capture,

command and commodify our attention, for when we devote attention to something, we are

simultaneously depositing information about ourselves as individuals, users and consumers.

These forces of informational production have birthed new power relations between

the users who produce this information those who own the vectors, of which YouTube is one,

through which information is circulated, what Wark has dubbed the hacker and vectoralist

classes, respectively. YouTube requires our information to sell to advertisers in order to

extract revenue, and the more we interact with the interface the more information can be

collected and exchanged. As a result, YouTube divides users into any number of diverse,

modulating interests and habits, each with its own corresponding market segment, while still

ostensibly representing distinct user profiles. Users are integral components of YouTube’s

machinery, but are constantly pictured by vectoral forces as recipients of the affordances the

platform provides them. Moreover, YouTube’s database renders the impression that all

information uploaded to it is equivocal but their appearance on the interface is strictly

hierarchized according to rank and relevance. This is a technique of transparency that

produces a regime of visibility on YouTube defined by the valorization of visibility itself. The

algorithms that process data and generate results do so through hegemonic patterns

determined by the confluence of protocological parameters, fluctuating cycles of media

events, advertising incentives and the user histories of databasins. These processes of vectoral

monopolization, user dividuation, and content standardizations are emblematic and

symptomatic of the digital logic of control societies wherein heterogeneous objects and

subjects are reduced to homogenized forms and relations.

What allows YouTube’s algorithms to process and present more and more information

is the fact that they are constantly rewriting themselves, that is, they remember by forgetting.

This is what we have identified as the database’s death-drive, or archiviolithic command of

continual update. Here again we are confronted with inevitability, albeit paradoxical, for that

which inevitably appears does so on the condition of inevitable disappearance. This command

is executed by algorithms represented on the interface as an endless sequence of videos

recommended to you, wherein there is always something “up next”. These video clips which

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afford visibility through the invisibility, and their own degeneration, are what we have

referred to as algorimages. These can be as disparate as a homemade prank video to a

documentation of police violence, but by virtue of being disseminated by the same process are

made generic and banal in a digital relation that may appear different but disappears all the

same. YouTube’s regime of visibility pertains not simply to videos and user engagements, but

forms of life. It is fundamentally a matter of political visibility. The incessant proliferation

and propagation of these algorimages is, figuratively and literally, executed by algorithms as a

form of necropower that produces YouTube not simply as a streaming service, but an ecology

of finitude. This milieu (re)produces the social infrastructure of control as a kind of “third

nature” wherein the forces of informational production, the relations between hacker

producer/vectoral provider, and the effect that anything can be represented so as long as it is

invested by an inevitable invisibility, are naturalized. YouTube is a platform on which the

diagram of control screens the disintegration of everything except itself as a form of

necropolitics.

Of course, we must recognize that this situation is not static, we have not reached yet

another supposed “end of history”. The thesis is not necessarily prescriptive, partly because it

would take a whole other thesis to undertake such a task, but also because what we have been

analyzing induces an effect of there being no way out, or rather that everything is already,

inevitably outside. However, as Deleuze states, a dispositif also contains lines of flight that

“escapes preceding lines and escapes from itself,” splitting it apart into other dispositifs.228

This may open up the user from being a cog in YouTube’s machinery to any other vector. It

may also be the nexus of the new, for “the lines of subjectification seem particularly capable

of tracing paths of creation, which are continually being aborted, but then restarting, in a

modified way, until the former apparatus is broken.”229 This process of stop-start is strikingly

similar to how we have described the algorithmic command of continual update, where it is

the fact of breaking down that makes YouTube function so well. Yet, the example of the Eric

Garner video, for instance, provides a glimpse of the potential for YouTube to birth new

forms of social awareness and organization. The issue becomes seizing this stoppage and

sustaining the leakages where the individual becomes collective, as common experiences in

the commons. Something has to, and will happen, for better or for worse, and as Deleuze

proclaims: “[t]here is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”230

228 “What is a dispositif?,” 161. 229 Ibid., 164. 230 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4.

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