Intellectual Fast Food: How YouTube Exploits Fanon, Fisher, and the Revolution

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0200

The Inspiration Tab: How the Algorithm Generates Safe Rebellion

“You think Stardew Valley is a peaceful escape from the modern world, but what if I told you it is actually a simulator for colonial conquest? By applying the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, we will reveal how your ‘cozy’ farm is built upon the violent logic of settler-colonialism…”

This hook is not mine. Not because it is too radical, nor because it is too restrained. It is not mine because it is empty. It invokes Fanon’s name with complete solemnity and then… nothing happens. It poses a question that longs to be an idea: What if I told you that your peaceful farm is actually a simulator of colonial conquest?

All right, then. Tell me.

But the hook merely promises that it will. It announces a thought without ever thinking it. Fanon is used here as bait, not as an argument.

This is the outline of an entire essay generated by YouTube’s algorithm through the “Inspiration” tab; a place filled with hundreds of titles and ideas intended to inspire you to produce more content. Naturally, none of them threatens the status quo in any genuinely dangerous way. Each remains within the boundaries of a declared and ultimately safe form of rebellion. The outline, hook included, was generated as the most probable sequence of words capable of keeping the viewer in front of the screen for as long as possible. My role as a creator is simply to follow that sequence.

Nothing more. YouTube creates itself.

This is the real subject of the analysis. Stardew Valley is, at most, an exhibit; a pretext that happened to present itself to an algorithm driven by the relentless optimisation of viewer engagement. The algorithm commodifies rebellion. Fanon is stripped of his struggle and reduced to the subject of a supposedly profound video essay. Philosophy, once transformed into YouTube content, dies as a tool of resistance. It becomes raw material instead: grease in a machine that devours time.

Fanon on Colonial Media: Why Technology Is Never Neutral

Fanon addressed the very real struggles of people fighting for independence. Comparing those struggles to a pixelated turnip or JojaMart is absurd, and that is precisely why it is worth asking why the algorithm does it.

In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon describes radio as a technology whose meaning is politically contingent. Radio-Alger was the voice of the occupying power. Algerians boycotted it not out of irrationality, but because they could not separate the device from the power relations speaking through it. When the Voice of Fighting Algeria emerged, the same equipment became an instrument of revolution.

Technology itself does not determine meaning. What matters is who speaks through it, and whose interests that speech serves.

Fanon describes the same mechanism in his chapter on colonial medicine. Western knowledge is not neutral: it is tainted by the power relations within which it was produced. The Algerian cannot separate the doctor from the coloniser: not because he is irrational, but because he is right. Technology and knowledge flow through the structures of power that shape them. Neither can be torn free from those structures without consequence.

The YouTube algorithm, like that of any other platform, commodifies left-wing thought. Fanon, who fought against colonial rule, is ideologically dangerous. He must therefore be identified, processed, and reduced to an entry point for the consumption of content. For the algorithm, the essential task is to neutralise the message, allowing the viewer to move calmly on to the next short. No revolution. Just another piece of content. The entire historical context of struggle and death is removed in order to preserve the potential viewer’s comfort zone as securely as possible. What remains is a safe, neutralised video with a catchy thumbnail. The viewer is satisfied because they feel they have encountered the “real” Left, yet the cause for which these people fought ceases to matter. Before they have time to ask what that cause was, the next video begins playing eight seconds later, ensuring that the binge-watching remains uninterrupted.

The algorithm behind the “Inspiration” tab does not, actually, misinterpret Fanon. It passes him through a different set of power relations: those of a platform that monetises watch time through advertising. In doing so, it transforms Fanon into perfectly safe raw material, presented to creators as a commercial goldmine. His thought circulates online as a form of cultural capital which ultimately sustains a platform that is imperial in its very structure.

My own understanding of Fanon does not deepen simply because I continue staring at a screen. Consuming videos on a platform merely creates the illusion of engaging with radical thought. It is intellectual fast food in revolutionary packaging.

Capitalism does not directly prohibit ideas or cultural works; at least not while it remains stable and has not descended into fascism. Direct censorship is not necessary under capitalism. It is enough to strip an idea of its nuances and leave behind a hollow shell that can fit inside a thirty-second short. Rather than denying people access to anti-systemic thought, capitalism appropriates that thought as its own property. It then takes control of how it is represented and how it is consumed.

Why the Algorithm Prefers Fanon Over Fisher

No one conquers anyone in Stardew Valley. The Junimos are not an invisible labour force. The mine is not an instrument of resource extraction. All of this can be analysed through such a lens, but one has to be very determined to do so.

In Stardew Valley, we inherit a farm from our grandfather. The protagonist escapes Joja Corp., where they were little more than a number in a spreadsheet. Pelican Town appears as a refuge. There is no Fanon in Stardew Valley.

What we find instead is a redefinition of capitalist accumulation. Even if we ultimately drive the local JojaMart out of business and replace it with the Community Centre, we are still operating within Fisherian capitalist realism. Stardew Valley offers no genuine escape, because in the end we are still required to accumulate capital: to spend money on better tools so that we can work faster and earn more. Our fantasy of escape begins to crumble, because what the game sells us is a liberal dream: that with very little, just nothing more than an inherited farm, we can still build a decent life, provided we are willing to work hard enough.

This is precisely why the algorithm proposes Fanon before Fisher as a lens through which to analyse Stardew Valley. I would go so far as to argue that this is exactly why Fanon comes first. The platform marginalises capitalist realism because it lies too close to reality. It produces a kind of discomfort that undermines audience retention. Capitalist realism offers a precise description of what the platform itself does: it neutralises our imagination and leaves us unable to conceive of any other way of distributing culture. Fanon can be attached to a pixelated turnip and sold as an intellectual thriller. Fisher, by contrast, would directly dismantle the status quo.

The Impossibility of Escape: This Essay Is Also a Thumbnail

This essay is a thumbnail too. It, too, is a text circulating through a platform. It, too, distorts or omits certain elements, whether consciously or not. It, too, can become sensational: “How YouTube Neutralises Fanon: An Analysis.” If things go well, its best quotation may even be condensed into a thirty-second short. In the end, everything is passed through the same lens of neutralisation.

There is no good way out of this. There are certain things we no longer know how to imagine. Fisher’s well-known claim tells us that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. One possible reason is that we lack the vocabulary. We have countless ways of describing the end of the world: a zombie apocalypse, a meteor strike, nuclear war. An enormous number of novels and analyses, some more convincing than others, have been written on the subject. But the end of capitalism? We do not even know what to say. Just as the king once ruled by divine right, capitalism now rules by the supposed laws of human nature. It is easier for me to write an essay about the way the system absorbs criticism and turns it into video essays about pixelated turnips than it is to avoid being absorbed by that system myself.

The mere act of describing this mechanism is no final act of subversion. It is simply another product, soon to be ground up in the algorithm’s entrails and monetised.

This is where the conclusion should appear. The algorithm suggests: “Summarise the three main points. Offer the viewer hope, or at least a clear conclusion. End with a rhetorical question that encourages them to leave a comment.”

I would prefer not to.

Bibliography

These particular books affected the overall shape of the article