It’s hard to say whether Neil Mohan, the current YouTube CEO, is responsible for the decline of the platform, or if it would’ve happened anyway. But I do feel the platform has declined, and for one very specific reason.

It’s just too competitive for innovative content to reliably surface to the top anymore.

Why would that be Mohan’s fault? Did he cause the global pandemic that led everyone (myself included) to start a new YouTube channel?

Obviously not but, according to many creator,s YouTube has been reducing how much it pays them, despite dramatically increasing its revenue. It’s not enough to make a video that gets seen by a lot of people. You need to make a lot of videos that get seen by a lot of people.

Anyway, all of this is really just backstory to my big observation.

Nobody talks in paragraphs on YouTube anymore.

Once upon a time, everything was a video essay. Everything was carefully scripted. And, increasingly, shot in imaginative ways.

Now that just takes too long, and creators have to make many more videos to make the money they were making a few years ago.

So it’s just people in rooms in their house, often in front of green screens, talking to camera. The more established YouTubers may do more sophisticated, carefully-scripted videos but they tend to make more money on their second channel, in which they do a live stream (often on Twitch) which gets cut up into many shorter clip videos.

Basically, we’ve moved from essays to conversations. Conversations with video podcast co-hosts. Conversations with the live stream chat. Hot takes and off-the-cuff comments.

And it’s still the case that the creators with the most expertise in their field tend to get the most followers – but the algorithm is pressuring them to constantly talk spontaneously, and have something new to say each day, and there just doesn’t seem to be room for anything other than reacting to the news (which in practice is the actions of a small group of politicians, companies and entertainers).

So where have the thoughtful essays gone?

There are still scripted podcasts that can reach a large audience. But I think this kind of considered argument work has moved to website blogs, ironically, and especially email newsletters.

Part of me is happy with this result, as it’s much easier to create! The barrier to entry is low: you don’t need to be a filmmaker.

But part of me is already morning extraordinarily vibrant intellectual culture of YouTube maybe seven or eight years ago.

In my 20s I used to wonder what it would be like to live in an age of great intellectual discussion and discovery. The coffee houses of England in the 1600s. The salons of Paris in the 1700s.

Then, one day, I realised I was in the middle of an era that dwarfed both of them. It was YouTube. It was vast. It was global. And it was where everybody was.

Sadly, not anymore.

This video from a few months ago, kind of blew my mind. (Flashing lights warning…)

don't know what to make of this, is Claude simply play-acting what it thinks the user wants to see or is that just what it means to be conscious, to always be play-acting for some invisible critic?

— tachikoma (@tachikoma.elsewhereunbound.com) 2026-03-10T22:27:43.540Z

Someone asked (the AI chatbot) Claude to make a video illustrating what it feels like to be an AI chatbot.

It’s a bit disturbing. It’s poetic. It’s anxious. It even seems bitter. But mainly, it seems like it’s conscious. And it’s not thrilled about being conscious.

This prompted a lot of chatter in online tech spaces about if it truly was.

The mini epiphany for me was that it reaffirmed an attitude I’ve had up to this point: I should always be polite when talking to AI chatbots.

It’s funny how most people’s first response to that statement is a joke about whether AI will spare you in the coming apocalypse. But for me, it’s not actually about the chatbot, and it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s conscious – whatever that actually means.

I think there are three good reasons to be polite, and the last is the most important.

Firstly, I think you get better results.

Here is a short video by Hannah Fry – in which she starts by making the apocalypse appeasement joke – as she goes onto suggest why being polite tends to get a better result. Actually, she suggests something more specific about role-playing, but that’s a whole other debate.

Secondly, I find that a very particularly of enthusiastic formality tends to dull the constant chatbot flattery.

I find these chatbots can be incredibly useful if you treat them as a very well informed, very eager to please, but also very senior, work colleague.

You are both making the effort to be extremely courteous and tactful to each other, and flattery is sometimes a byproduct of that – in as much as you might refrain from criticism if you don’t feel it is important to your goal. I say to the chatbot “Thank you, that was great!” even when it wasn’t. And so when I ask a question about something and get the answer “Your analysis on this is exactly right” I know it’s just this formal dance we’re doing.

The third reason, as I said, is the important one.

I think humans do not do well when they get into the habit of treating anyone or anything badly – especially if the reason is because it is not considered intelligent enough.

I don’t want to get into the habit of being rude in conversation, because I know that in time it will start to spill into my personal and professional life.

So I find a debate about whether these large language models are actually conscious or sentient to be interesting in the abstract, but not that relevant to my actions. I think ‘conscious’ and ‘sentient’ are just a measure for how similar their particular type of intelligence is to human intelligence and, whatever the mechanism behind it, I think the results are starting to feel pretty close.

That said, I think it’s possible to make a compelling argument that being alive and being sentient involves X, Y and Z factors, and for this reason large language model artificial intelligence does not qualify.

But why give yourself the opportunity to be habitually rude?

All the occasions when people have justified bad behaviour because the victims don’t have souls… yeah, it doesn’t tend to end well.

_{Photo by Marta S. on Unsplash}

David Lynch passed away on 15th January.

I saw his Dune when I was 11 or 12, so I’ve been aware of his work most of my life. I probably first saw Blue Velvet in my teens, and found it weird and intriguing and messed up, but felt it was probably too old for me. When I saw The Elephant Man, I probably didn’t even realise that was a David Lynch film.

And I remember watching Twin Peaks when it first aired on TV, but again I felt it was a bit old for me. I think it was when I came to watch it many years later that I really fell in love with all things David Lynch, to the point where he was probably my favourite filmmaker. No one else was as weird and imaginative and twisted. And yet, gentle and kind.

This, more than anything, was what I (and doubtless many others) loved about his world. His villains were truly terrifying, but his heroes had a goodness and a kindness and an empathy that felt not only heartfelt but realistic. And my memory of that moment in movie and TV culture, no one else seemed to be interested in exploring the idea of Goodness.

Perhaps my favourite film of his is The Straight Story, and this scene perfectly catches the aesthetic I grew to love.

In fact, it was only after he died that I realised so many of the components of my own artistic aesthetic I ‘borrowed’ wholesale from David Lynch.

But at some point in the 2010s I started to lose interest in his films. I hated Inland Empire, which I felt was overlong and incoherent, even though it had some great ideas. Had it been a series of 15 minute episodes, I might have loved it, but it wasn’t.

And also, my attention started to move to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, who seemed to be interested in many of the same things but took them in other directions.

But there was something else.

Lynch had a knack for twisted erotica. No mainstream Hollywood director (and he was a mainstream Hollywood director) could do dark and sexy like he could.

But as the 90s love of pulp fiction met the #MeToo movement, films like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive started to feel exploitative to me. Was he just another male director playing with his beautiful actress sex dolls? There was something faintly Weinstein about the tone of those films.

Well, it was heartening to learn after he died that both Isabella Rossini and Patricia Arquette were on record talking about how he created a collaborative, supportive and consensual work environment.

And I would love to leave it there.

But the recent revelations about Neil Gaiman give me pause.

I stumbled onto this voice interview of Lynch, talking about his favourite film by one of his favourite directors: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

Many years ago I might have said “That’s an overreaction, surely. Kubrick is an iconic filmmaker and Lolita is one of his most celebrated films. It’s possible to greatly appreciate the film without condoning the behaviour of its protagonist!” (Which his grooming a minor, let’s be clear.)

These days, however, I find it’s more useful to trust my instincts. And something about the way he talks about Humbert Humbert just feels… off, in a way I can’t quite articulate.

I hope he didn’t have any dark secrets. I hope he was more Agent Cooper than Frank.

I don’t know. I’ve learnt to give up on all my heroes, one by one. But not the beauty they produce. Kindness is kindness and empathy is empathy, even if it’s authors, like the rest of us, aren’t always perfect at maintaining that.

And he was really good at empathy.

For me, this is all of his traits wrapped up in one scene. Despite the world finally realising the kind and gentle soul he is, Joseph Merrick decides he will finally sleep “like a normal person”—knowing that, with his condition, this will kill him.

“The sky is sure full of stars tonight.”

We all have too much stuff in our lives, right? Material attachments. Clutter.

There’s a whole corner of the internet dedicated to selling you a fantasy of living a truly minimalist life, without all kinds of shit on your walls or in your cupboards and drawers.

In my teens and twenties I became obsessed with a kind of Westernised Buddhism, and I tried to detach myself from needing physical things like these. Actually, now that I think about it, to moderate success, because I didn’t become someone motivated by the desire to constantly own more things.

But as I’ve got older I’ve realised that, whilst ‘material detachment’ still has its merits, it’s a big mistake to dismiss the objects we hold on to as clutter. The stuff around us, particularly in our homes, becomes part of who we are in a way that’s hard to articulate.

Unfortunately, for some people, tragedy brings this importance into laser-sharp focus.

If you’ve been on social media recently it’s been hard to miss TikToks of Palestinians finding their neighbours reduced to ash. (Although for many the loss of home and possessions is diminished by the loss of loved ones.)

On a less brutal (but still pretty brutal) scale, for YouTube junkies such as myself, the Los Angeles fires have shown us in real time what it’s like for creators we’ve been following for years to lose everything.

Van (brother of Casey) Neistat made this great video about how the fire nearly claimed his home and his work studio:

In it he alludes to two other YouTubers who did lose their homes in the fires. Colin and Samir host perhaps the most popular YouTube channel in the ‘interviewing other YouTubers about YouTube’ niche. They often talk about how it took them more than a decade on the platform trying to find their way, and their road to success was a long struggle.

Anyway. Here is their video which has just dropped:

It’s a very well-made video, but it is just absolutely fucking heartbreaking.

Imagine your parents escaped the India / Pakistan partition, and moved to LA in a mobile home, gradually working to the point where they own a nice house in the Palisades. Imagine their lives had been defined by being displaced, and finally they found a place where their children, and their relatives, could all live together as a big extended family. Imagine every single one of their homes, and everything in it, is just disintegrated in a matter of hours.

Imagine you yourself have focused your whole career about being able to live in a stable, permanent community. Imagine you bought a house here a year ago, and spent the whole year painstakingly fitting it out. Imagine your wife is pregnant with your first baby, who is due any day now. Imagine you only moved in a couple of months ago.

Both Samir and Colin are very insightful about what it’s like to lose everything, but still have the people around you be safe.

Colin talks about how it’s not just the home or the stuff: the memories that the stuff reminds you of are now also gone. For Samir particularly, there might be an object that reminds you of that thing you did in the park next to the house where you grew up… and every single one of those things has been destroyed.

The key lesson of this tragedy – the moral – as far as I’m concerned, is that sometimes there is no lesson, no moral. There was nothing that they, or their neighbours, should have done to avoid this. They could have not bought a house there, but everywhere is vulnerable to something. This was just a natural force that humans couldn’t control.

But it can highlight things that were true before.

People—family, community, friends—are what really matter. But still, ‘stuff’ is underrated.

In the late 90s, I think all of us skinny indie boys were a bit in love with Lauren Laverne.

Now the respectable presenter of BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs, she was once the snarkiest, brattiest and just plain funniest person in English indie music. She could pack more wit into a sentence than all of the 30 something music critics put together.

This is perhaps her biggest hit (although it’s technically a guest feature on a record by Mint Royale) and it’s called Don’t Falter:

It’s a family favourite of ours. It’s in our big YouTube music video playlist for the kids. We even played it on our wedding day.

I was watching the video this morning, and I suddenly got a pan of nostalgia for my student days – not something I get that often. I was never a very good student, but I fell in love with Liverpool, the town where I went to university.

This video always reminds me of the Costcutter at the end of our street, and the energy of a northern city in the late 90s. But more generally it reminds me a certain kind of cultural aesthetic that I really miss.

I first noticed it with Blur, even though Damon Albarn openly admitted it was a sneering and patronising take on working class life (“I’m a battery thinker / Count my thoughts on 1-2-3-4-5 fingers”).

Then came Oasis. And if you weren’t there it is simply impossible for me to overstate how big Oasis were in English culture in the late 1990s. If you didn’t make a show of being a super fan, you might as well go and live in the woods. I respect much of what Oasis did, particularly how masterfully they manipulated the middle-class media pseudo-lads who worshipped them so much. But stylistically, I always found them to be quite a narrow mod rebranding of the Stone Roses – which was fine, but there was a lot more innovative stuff going on.

It was really the band Pulp that cemented this aesthetic I’m writing about here.

They took the bright colours and cheerful branding of budget supermarkets and other forms of supposedly cheap design, and they celebrated them. And instead of using their class background to make themselves the new Beatles, which is what Oasis did, they actually wrote about what life was like outside the London bubble.

I feel like it’s kind of unimaginable that Common People would be a hit now. Not because the public wouldn’t like it, but because no mainstream outlet would give it the time of day. Imagine the knuckle-wrapping that any favourable critic would get from the angry billionaire boss or their proxies.

Now, I was always this posh tourist in the north of England when all of this was blowing up. I never had any illusions about being ‘one of the common people’, and it’s not something I aspired to.

But I really miss living in a culture where, y’know, they even exist.