Confessions of Video Essay Addict

Video essays are my guilty pleasure. Maybe they should be yours, too. Maybe...

In the wake of the 2024 election, I have been thinking about my media consumption. So much of what I consumed these last months was about the election. My media diet has become unhealthily lopsided toward politics.

Remember the food pyramid? This election season exposed how unbalanced my media consumption pyramid has become. The base (my daily bread) is bloated with American political podcasts and print news media. The most nourishing media groups — books, films, longform journalism — have shrunk under the pressure. Even the most noxious medium, shortform video content, has wormed its way into my diet through news outlets and this very platform, Substack. My previously healthy media pyramid has been inverted.

There is one other medium I consume in large doses that, frankly, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I do. Video essays are, after all, not high culture. But reflecting on my media diet critically, I am reminded that video essays offer a distinct piquancy that helps balance me out through all the other garbage I’m consuming. The humble YouTube video is a healthy part of my media diet and has been for a long time. You, too, might benefit from a hearty helping of video essay to ballast you against our caustic media environment. Let me serve up a few — you might like what you try.

A video essay is a loosely defined piece of digital content, usually published on YouTube, in which a creator or team of creators perform an essay script overlaid on video. The backing video can be of the creator talking to camera or any other relevant visual material. Just like a written essay, a video essay can extend to any topic under the sun. The format is otherwise open-ended.

As a general rule, YouTube video essays are considered misanthropic content. It is a medium for the chronically online, the pseudo-intellectual anti-social internet class. The video essay (or essay film) existed before the internet¹ but only became a distinct format following the advent of video streaming and the wave of parasocial relationships that followed. In other words, video essays are for lonely dweebs.

In my relentless attempt to embarrass myself on this blog, I must confess my love for the video essay. I don’t know when my interest began (sometime in college I suspect), but over the last decade, I have watched hundreds of hours of longform video essay content. They’re a source of relaxation and inspiration; a research method; a bizarre practice in connectivity. I turn to video essays to inform my politics and worldview. On a quiet Friday night, I’ll switch on a two-hour essay and feel the night has not been wasted. Unlike TV or other social media, video essays feel good to consume.

To be clear, YouTube videos are not generally worthwhile content. Passive consumption of any media is a sure-fire way to weaken intellectual muscles. YouTube is also a meat-grinder of base, regurgitated slop intended to maximize view time and therein advertisement dollars. The YouTube platform, alongside the rest of the internet, is in the process of irreversible enshitification.

Buried under the rubble, though, is a treasure trove of authentically great essayistic content. Videos that will introduce you to new ideas. Videos that will test your preconceptions. Videos that will make you fume, force you to laugh, and engender deep feelings. The best video essays, the essays that ask the most of you, the viewer — those essays transcend their medium as singular expressions of profound art.

For the rest of this post, I want to convince you of my guilty pleasure. I have broken the video essay format into three rough categories which I’ll explore with several examples. Then, I’ll highlight a single creator and link (in my estimation) their best work. Click a few links, watch a few videos — see if anything sparks your interest. Avoid politics (or don’t). But be careful. Like any diet, you have to watch what you eat.

Educational essays: Citations needed

The workhorses of (worthwhile) video essays on YouTube are adjacent to academia, history, and investigative journalism. These education-forward essays are a step above the glossy, over-produced content of creators like Johnny Harris, Vox, or Today I Found Out. Good educational essays are founded on thorough research performed by experts or industry professionals who, importantly, cite their sources.

Educational essays can be dry, I’ll admit, but they can also demystify complex or boring subjects with accessible graphics. There are too many great creators to highlight here, so here are a few of my favorites:

• Religion for Breakfast covers historical religious figures and movements from an academic perspective, using original texts and scholarship to explore knotted topics.

• Stefan Milo summarizes ongoing debates and theories within the archeological field with humble humor and an eye for novel scholarship.

• Dr. Fatima is a published astrophysicist who covers systemic problems in physics and the broader scientific community, all while wearing terrifying nails.

• Premodernist is a historian who explores the study of history and the way we tell stories with historism. His video covering the election of George Washington was the inspiration for my last post about the Electoral College.

• Useful Charts - A religious studies scholar who uses charts as a tool for exploring history, religion, and contemporary figures.

• 3Blue1Brown - Math, statistics, physics, and computer science come to life through beautiful visual graphics.

Knowing Better

One creator who has profoundly shaped my understanding of history is Knowing Better. Knowing Better (KB) is an ex-American history teacher who quit his job to produce essays full time. His recent mission has been to rectify any misinformation he perpetuated as a high school history teacher, dispelling what he calls the “Standard American History Myth”. Going back to the founding of the United States and the Jamestown colony, he painstakingly retreads the history of American tobacco, company towns, new religions, removal of the Indian population, and (my favorite, timely essay) the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. KB’s research reveals the fluidity of historical events.

I’ll admit KB is not always the most approachable creator; his style can be overly didactic at times, and his use of recurring bit characters (one of whom is stuck in a TV for unclear reasons) can come across as plain goofy. Embedded in his dozens of hours of meticulously researched content, though, is a refreshingly honest history about who we are as Americans and where the foundations of our society lay.

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Subcultural essays: Edu-tainment, weird corners, and mind goop

Taking a step beyond the purely educational, we arrive at a looser category of video essays which I’ve dubbed ‘subcultural essays.’ Here the format dives into unexpected territory, best summarized by the dictum: for anything that exists, there is a video essay about it. The weirder, the better.

Remember Kony 2012? Or that time Alex Jones claimed the frogs are turning gay? Perhaps commodity fetishism is more your thing? Because of their flexible format and relatively low barrier to entry, video essays cover the full breadth of human experience. One Reddit user even compiled 600 of their favorites into a Video Essay Hall of Fame. Any subculture can be interrogated or celebrated.

That diversity works in the medium’s favor and is also its greatest weakness. Novel-Translator3936, the Hall of Fame creator, summarizes the problem well while trying to land on a definition of a video essay.

“A video essay is a complete and utter mystery. In all my research I can not find a single unified definition for what is and is not considered an essay. It is a term that can [loosely] be applied to any short form writing that cannot already be defined by another term.”

Anyone can create a twenty-minute video covering a piece of culture — beloved or hated — and call it an essay, regardless of intention or rigor. Accordingly, the pool of video essay content is highly diluted. For every great creator, there are dozens of poor imitators who produce glossy or pseudo-informed content barely distinguishable from the authentic goods. Considering the automatic algorithmic feed of YouTube as well, viewers also have little control over what they’re fed. A consumer of video essay content has to watch with their eyes open, prepared to think critically about the information presented to them. There are no guardrails on the internet.

For this section, I’ve chosen a selection of essayists whose work represents the diversity of the medium, in format, style, length, tone, and subject. Your mileage will vary. Use the opportunity to think about what interests you and find a creator who publishes high-quality content on that subject.

• Jon Bois and Secret Base - Jon Bois is a progenitive mind in the world of video essays. He’s an O.G., the originator of a wholly unique style of essay production which has now grown into a distinct sub-genre. Hilarious, myopic, giant — Bois, and his later channel Secret Base, propels viewers through sports stories using the power of statistics.

• Thomas Flight - Producing clean, succinct, visually attractive essays on film and television, Thomas Flight is a reliable mainstay of the format.

• Jenny Nicholson - Jenny is one of the more beloved video essayists on YouTube. She discusses movies, TV, theme parks, and subcultural experiences with compassion and a keen eye. Watching Jenny is a comfort watch. Through time, her work has become increasingly ambitious, both in length and scope.

• Linus Bowman - Linus produces some of the highest quality shortform video essays on YouTube. A professional graphic designer, he explores how design and language influence (and are influenced by) our culture. His content is sumptuously sleek. The work of a true professional.

• Whitelight - I expect no one who receives this newsletter to be interested in Whitelight. To call him an essayist might also be a stretch. Whitelight is a prolific video game critic who produces longform game retrospectives. His best (and I believe longest) work is a seven-hour odyssey into the world of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. I struggle to even articulate the appeal of such content, yet Whitelight so continuously pushes the boundary of the format that I believe he’s worthy of praise.

• Tentacrul - Tentacrul’s many themes spiral out like thoughtful tendrils. Music, digitalization, software, design, and philosophy come together through personal storytelling and sharp editing.

Defunctland

No channel better encapsulates the weirdest corners of the video essay medium more than Defunctland, a project of filmmaker Kevin Perjurer. On the surface, Defunctland makes documentaries about theme parks. An average video will re-litigate the history of a specific theme park attraction, venue, designer, or company using diligent research. For forty-five minutes, he’ll walk through the creation of institutions like E.P.C.O.T or Tomorrowland with a characteristically dry delivery and a fresh peppering of hilarious quotes from park guests. Perjurer does some serious crate digging for material — his videos are brimming with archival footage from obscure, oft-forgotten places. I dare not imagine how much time goes into the editing of one video, which increasingly approaches two hours in length.

Something else, though, separates Defunctland from other creators. I struggle to pinpoint the exact magic, but his videos have a secret sauce. Perjurer’s experience might have something to do with it; the man has been drilling into one theme — theme parks (pun intended) — for nearly eight years. That mastery of subject fleshes out his videos, makes them feel robust and meaty. I can tell when watching Defunctland that the creator has an institutional knowledge (and institutional critique) of his field beyond my understanding.

His video on the Disney FastPass system is, in my opinion, his magnum opus. What begins as a descriptive history of a mundane ticketing system develops into a far-reaching analysis of human behavior and greed.

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Criticism: The art of the video essay

YouTube creators of any genre are often held hostage by the platform’s policies and practices. Alphabet, Google’s parent company and owner of YouTube, is only interested in maximizing view-time (eyeballs on screens) and has designed a platform that encourages creators to do the same. Quantity is more valuable to YouTube than quality.

There’s also the matter of ad sales. YouTube wants content on its site that can easily be sold to advertisers; kid-friendly, attention-grabbing videos will always be more valuable in the attention economy. The more contentious or transgressive a video, the less likely it is to receive ad revenue and, thus, preferential treatment by the YouTube algorithm.

Critical creators have an uphill battle before them then, if they want to find success on the platform. Producing rigorous video essays requires a significant time investment, and creators always face algorithmic roulette when they upload. To spend months researching, writing, recording, and editing an essay targeted toward adults is a huge risk. Few do it, and even fewer do it well.

Here are some of the sharpest voices in the video essay community. Their work stretches beyond content and into the realm of real craft.

• Zoe Bee - Zoe is a secret juggernaut of critical thinking in video essay form. Sitting casually on her couch as her cat prowls about, she distills layers of her nuanced theses with a pedagogical approachability. But don’t be misled. There is might to be found in her essay scripts. Her extremely well-sourced analyses involving education, politics, and language are razor-sharp.

• F.D Signifier - Media criticism is a natural fit for the video essay format. F.D is one of the best media studies creators on the platform. With bracing clarity, he focuses primarily on black representation in media.

• Lily Alexandre - Discussing gender, trans identity, and feminism, Lily’s channel packages the most fraught conversations happening in our society into accessible, personal vehicles that feel like the insights of your smartest friend. A day hasn’t gone by since I watched her video ‘What are women?’ that the question hasn’t plagued me.

• Folding Ideas - Dan Olson’s channel Folding Ideas has been a mainstay of the video essay format for as long as it has existed on YouTube. His videos reflect a level of craftsmanship, an earned proficiency in filmmaking and storytelling that I believe is unparalleled. No one else can make a seventeen-minute diatribe about chicken nuggets feel so richly contemplative and profoundly absurd.

• Hbomberguy - If measured in pretend internet clout, Hbomberguy is one of the most respected (and perhaps feared) creators on YouTube. The channel, created by undeniable hyper-nerd Harry Brewis, has metamorphosed since its inception in 2006 into a behemoth of internet cultural criticism. Nowadays, Harry produces a video, at most, once a year, as his creative ambition has grown to near-auteur levels. His four-hour saga about plagiarism in the YouTube video essay ecosystem is a shocking, neurotic retrospection on his own artistic medium. Harry is a manifestation of the internet’s recursive anger, pointed right back at the internet itself.

ContraPoints

Among all of the video essayists on the internet, I consider one head and shoulders above the rest. ContraPoints is unlike any other creator. ContraPoints is a Fabergé egg of a YouTube channel — opulent, intricate, and fabulously rare.

The brainchild of philosophy PhD dropout Natalie Wynn, ContraPoints contentiously engages with the ills of contemporary society through relentless, labyrinthine essays about fundamental human social constructs. Justice, shame, beauty, gender, capitalism. The videos are expertly crafted argumentations, often in the form of philosophical dialectics, delivered through extravagant productions of (and sometimes about) Natalie herself. Natalie is a performer as much as she is a researcher or philosopher.

To the unfamiliar, watching a ContraPoints video is likely a jarring experience. Natalie makes no consolations. Her discussions are heady and ethically complex, rooted in both advanced academic discourses and inane pop-cultural references. Natalie is a transgender woman and regularly uses her trans identity to wallop the viewer over the head with a cudgel, forcing us to reflect on our preconceptions about trans people, alternative identities, and the very concept of ‘identity’.

The characters she plays on screen are also unflinching. She is a fabulous diva; she is a radical feminist; she is a punitive god. Her jokes are transgressive, even crass. ContraPoints is intended to make us uncomfortable, especially those of us who find her content discomforting (and chances are, if you’ve never heard of her, you’re in that camp).

Your first response to Natalie’s work might be, “What the hell am I watching?”

Your second response might be, “I hate this.”

If you stick around, though, and allow yourself to steep in the profound philosophical examination that is ContraPoints, I think you’ll explore ideas you have never previously considered, challenged as you have been by an uncompromising artist.

1. The earliest examples of the video essay, or “film essay” as filmmaker Hans Richter coined in 1940, as a distinct creative format coincide with the development of the film and documentary industries. This Dazed article points to the 1909 film A Corner in Wheat, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 all as examples of the video essay slipping between the cracks of other genres of video production and into our media consumption diet.