Breadtube

I discovered “Breadtube” relatively recently (I know, pathetic…) and I am completely hooked. Breadtube is a Youtube genre consisting in publishing long, complex video essays of left-leaning content, often aimed at debunking right-wing conspiracies or conservative arguments. The term is used to refer both to the genre itself and to the loose group of content creators in this genre.

Breadtube video essays are almost always fairly long and complex, requiring a good attention span and the willingness to follow the content creator along in what is usually a tricky, multi-stepped argument. Several “Breadtubers” have an academic background – e.g. in philosophy, history, or economics – and are not shy to use it. Indeed, one might say that what they are doing is reinventing the genre of the academic argument and giving it a new shape.

Breadtube video essays are also – often, at least – visually very elaborate, although this is not considered a necessary element of the genre. The primary example is Contrapoints, who often impersonates different, extravagantly dressed and behaved, characters and structures her argument around a narrative that has them as protagonists. Often this takes the form of a debate between different positions, accompanied by exuberant aesthetics, music, and bits and pieces of more theatrical performance – a revisited French salon, or Socratic dialogue, of sorts. Other “breadtubers” who used to create more classical video essays (i.e. videos which consisted in talking to the camera lecture-style, at most showing some images, videos, and graphs) have recently largely followed Contrapoints’ style (see e.g. Philosophy Tube, or Mia Mulder).

The point of this post is really just to flag Breadtube to readers who haven’t yet been exposed to this genre, because it is really pretty great. I had discovered Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency before (I used to start my third year module on feminism by showing her brilliant video on Lego), and in a way she can be considered a Breadtube predecessor. Yet, there is something unique about the artistic quality and the effort put in curating the formal and aesthetic aspects of the best Breadtube videos, as well as their use of wit and irony to make an argument. Some content is a little naïve, but most is absolutely brilliant. I now assign Contrapoints’s video responding to gender critical feminism as one of the core readings in my course, and I have uploaded both her and Philosophy Tube’s video essays on beauty as recommended material for my week on gendered standards of appearance. More recently, Contrapoints has even moved beyond the genre of the video essay narrowly conceived: her last few videos are no longer “debates with frocks,” but proper stories with a philosophical morale (Voltaire comes to mind).

You might think this is all very well, but ultimately just more content for the usual lefty, intellectual, edgy bubble. Yet Contrapoints has a reasonably impressive (and apparently not merely anecdotal) record in “deradicalising” young right wingers. It is worth asking whether these are new forms of political, ad broadly speaking “public intellectual,” communication with broader potential than even many of its regular consumers might dare imagining. I will certainly keep an eye on them.