I’m married to my phone in all but the paperwork. This is great if you want to get ahold of me quickly, but not so great for my mental health, because I keep scrolling through various feeds until I can’t take it anymore. Just because I gave up Twitter doesn’t mean I can’t waste hours a day on social media. When I worked for an advertising agency, I used to make fun of clients’ demands for “thumb-stopping content”1 that would force potential customers to stop scrolling through their feed to pay attention to brand messaging. Now it’s all I do when I’m trawling social media: I scroll, then stop, my attention caught up by some video of something new that I’ll likely forget by the end of the day. Most of the time, the thing that piqued my sense of curiosity, and therefore got me to stop scrolling, is a craft video.
Craft videos are a remarkably expansive category: time-lapses of paintings, dot mandalas, paint “pours” (someone dumping acrylic paint on a pre-treated canvas) and “blow outs” (blowing the previously-dumped acrylic paint into patterns with a hair dryer), embroidery, weaving, woodturning and carving, lampshade making, furniture restoration, epoxy, stained glass, dioramas, and even tattooing. Some videos are demonstrations of a skill or technique; some document the creation of a specific piece; others function as an advertisement for the artisan working their craft. Others still can hardly be called “crafts” at all, instead depicting beautiful women as they cut up soda bottles and flip-flops and spray-foam molds to turn them into something deranged, a craft project that will fall apart the moment the camera is off.
Craft videos may be heavily edited and produced, or they may be shot in a single take by an amateur. The aesthetics and the production value of the craft video itself are just as varied as the expanse of crafts that appear in them, and therefore can’t be judged as part of what makes a craft video a craft video. Craft videos are, effectively, representative of nearly all other kinds of videos that can be found on the internet.2
For clarity’s sake, I’ll define craft videos this way: a video depicting some kind of transformation of a set of materials into some other thing, the purpose of its creation being to share and engage with on social media. Sometimes the transformation is artful; sometimes it’s amateur. The point of the craft video is not just the craft being made, nor the craft’s quality. Crafts don’t need to be documented in order to count as crafts. Nor does the craft video need to depict the creation of fine-art masterpieces in order to be legitimate in and of itself. Craft videos frequently demonstrate crafts and techniques that any viewer with enough time, tools, dedication, and practice can pull off themselves. And, to a certain extent, the quality of the video itself—its framing, cinematography, editing, and so on—has to be divorced from the definition of a craft video, too. Craft videos are craft videos whether they’ve been heavily produced or just filmed on the fly with a cell-phone camera. Some are informative, some are genuinely impressive, but a good craft video needs to be entertaining.
It’s all “content,” to a certain extent. Some of the videos happen to be of a higher quality, or show a more difficult craft, or manage to be more entertaining, or elicit a bigger rise out of people while they’re watching, but they’re all videos that wouldn’t exist without the internet landscape we have today. The point of the craft video isn’t just the transformation of materials, nor even the documentation of that transformation. The point of the craft video is to be shared, to be rocks in the middle of the social media stream for users to bump up against and watch before moving on with their lives. They’re like the air we breathe when we’re online, the nuggets of information we engage with before scrolling to the next thing. Craft videos are a synecdoche for social media, the entity that captures the entirety of what it means to be Extremely Online right now.
As far as social media goes, craft videos feel fairly benign. For as long as people have had the internet, we’ve always been stuck with mass scrutiny, with the crowd of voices clamoring for attention, the scams and the legitimate cries for help, the opportunities to get to know like-minded individuals on the other side of the world. Social media can be a safe haven for the lonely and a rabbit hole for diving into ever-worsening extremism. Pet videos, the staple of the internet shortly after the inception of Facebook, feel quaint in and of themselves. No one goes to YouTube just to watch a single cat video anymore—we simply watch compilations, or else we catch videos as they come up, steady islands in the stream of a social media feed. Stop over a video of somebody’s pet, and the algorithm will start serving up more videos of the same kind of animal. Spend enough time online and you’ll see plenty of cats and dogs and, eventually, somebody making something.
Craft videos are reliable, and because they document so many different kinds of crafts, they’re easy to stumble across: a whirlpool with a wide and powerful radius. Watch a video about someone recreating a prop from your favorite movie, and soon you’ll find more of the same—a pair of hands, measuring and cutting and gluing, which will morph in the stream to another pair of hands sewing, which will become yet another pair, daubing paint. The music is calm, or else it’s bouncy. There’s no need to work hard to follow what’s happening onscreen. Craft videos are little ephemeral creation stories, writ small enough for the palm of a hand and a short attention span.
The internet loves ephemera, at least until it starts to feel old. Create a meme from an old template and you’ll appear out of touch; the churn of the social media stream includes an eternal shift toward whatever else is new and novel, the constant creation of new in-jokes for a crowd of people that is itself ever-shifting. This also means that social media denizens are always looking for something new to latch onto, whether it’s a just cause or moral outrage or the ability to laugh at whoever became the main character for the day. We want something to get its hooks into us; we want to be grabbed and entertained and feel smart while we’re doing it, which is why the genre that grabs internet denizens the hardest is anything that smacks of mystery.
What secret message is Taylor Swift sending, personally, to her fans? What happened to Kate Middleton? What happened to Britney Spears? Was 9/11 an inside job? Who was the Golden State Killer? The internet loves a conspiracy theory, a mystery, true crime; the bones of the place are built on searches for answers to life’s questions, big or small, real or deluded. Google’s usually the first step to getting somewhere in a browser, and Google queries are often the first step to answering a question: how long do I need to hard boil eggs? What are the operating hours for that restaurant I like? How do I restart the pilot light on my water heater? Search engines have provided the scaffolding for the internet since before social media, which in turn built itself around other existential questions: what’s happening? What’s going on? What are all my friends up to, with or without me?
Part of the appeal of being Extremely Online is the knowledge that we aren’t alone, whether it’s through the camaraderie of posting deranged jokes or engaging in a community of like-minded individuals. We’re constantly crowdsourcing, looking for companionship; all good and bad aside, the internet is a vehicle for building a shared version of the world, inflected by the common interests of its users. We can crowdsource answers to practical questions, find encouragement, fall deeper down a rabbit hole. The internet rewards inquisitiveness by returning more of the same, tenfold and intensified, sometimes warped into a picture beyond the recognition of the initial search. An innocent Google query can lead to lifelong friends, a delusion, conspiratorial thinking, or a good story, just as easily as it can simply deliver an answer. It’s all a mystery, to one degree or another.
Craft videos capture the inquisitive nature of the internet because they themselves are little mysteries, regardless of the quality of craft or quality of production. A craft video makes a case for itself by presenting its content as the answer to a question: what is the artist making? What technique will they use to make it? In the case of the truly deranged videos, the mystery is fairly straightforward: what the hell am I watching?
The craft video is made to keep eyes on it until it’s complete, an endeavor to increase engagement and encourage the viewer to check out the artist’s work (if the video was posted by the artist themself), or to stay on the channel where the video surfaced (if it was posted by an aggregator), or to get mad and share the video with others (if the craft video is of the cursed variety). The underlying reason behind the posting of the video comes down to commerce either way: the artist hopes their work will find new eyes, while the aggregator and bad-faith videos are about gathering enough eyeballs to make advertising monetization worth the cost. But the underlying reason behind the technique of the video, its structure and editing, is about the mystery of the thing being made.
You rarely see the finished object before the end of the video; if you do, it’s a flash at the front to pique your interest, to get you to stop scrolling and think, How did they make that? The rest of the video is the long, slow reveal of the answer to the mystery, whether explained in captions or voiceover, or through the silent demonstration of a technique. Other videos prefer to leave the final product unknown until the very end, teasing the final result by showing the creation of the thing in snippets. In videos that showcase a craftsperson’s process, we might get a close-up of tools cutting into wood, or of careful brush strokes laying paint down, layer after layer. Attention is paid to clean lines and satisfying steps; if the process is long, it’s usually a time-lapse that showcases large developments, leaving the tedious details for the artist to muddle through in sequences that have been edited out. The goal isn’t to be educational; it’s to catch the eye, to tell the story of the craft as it comes into being in bite-sized pieces, steps the viewer can put together like an audience assembling a case alongside a detective in a mystery story.
Sometimes, of course, the case is deranged, stranger than fiction, the mad musings of an internet warped by systems that serve the algorithm over people. It’s no secret that finding answers to questions by Googling them is a lot harder than it used to be; successful websites that want to rank high on search results must tailor themselves for SEO. The goal isn’t to be informative, or unique; it’s to capture the attention of inhuman website crawlers effectively enough that your site will land at the top of search results, generating more clicks. Deliver enough of what the algorithm wants, and it will favor more content like yours, a funhouse-mirror ouroboros that doesn’t need to take actual human input into account in order to deliver “effective” search results. We’re left with a long series of sites that mostly look the same, that repeat the same unchecked facts over and over again, rendering the answered-question reputation of search engines like Google untrustworthy. The answer can’t be an answer if it isn’t tailored properly for SEO.
Algorithm warp isn’t responsible for all the evils of the internet, nor has it fully ruined its ability to function—there are too many humans present and able to communicate with each other for the internet to be considered completely unusable. But the algorithm does affect the way we engage with others: we expect it to deliver the best of what we’ve missed when we’ve signed on, and by the algorithm’s own standards, the best is whatever’s received the highest engagement, the most conversation, the biggest buzz. Whatever encourages our worst impulses—fear, conspiracy theories, something to be mad at—floats to the top. Enter the deranged craft video: a collection of sped-up, loosely-related montages of women dipping bread into concrete and calling the result a “coaster.” These videos thrive on the negative attention; whenever I see one surface in my feed, it’s trailed by a series of comments tagging other people to come and look at the nonsense.
There’s no craft in these craft videos, just a gleeful embrace of whatever brightly-colored nonsense will draw the most ire from as many people as possible. These videos tend to be amateurish, poorly edited, with obvious changes from shot to shot that make it clear any slipshod “craft” work that went into the assembly of the video was not actually about making anything except a piece of social media content. Some even include fine-print disclaimers, pretending to absolve the creators of any responsibility for the dreck they’ve unleashed onto the internet by claiming the title “parody.” The point of these videos, like all other craft videos, is to be shared and engaged with on social media. They can’t be separated from the genre, even as they drag the media form down into a meaningless marsh of frenetic editing and incoherent craft mashups.
As a lone internet denizen, it’s impossible to change the ecosystem of craft-video dreck entirely. I can’t “no true Scotsman” my way out of lumping the tailored-for-the-algorithm craft videos together with everything else in the genre, good, bad, or neutral. It’s impossible to fix the algorithm, and I can’t fully escape it, but I can reject it and shape it by adjusting my browsing habits so that it isn’t the only thing serving me something. Craft videos shouldn’t be rocks in a stream that I bump up against and then forget; they’re opportunities for something much richer and more interesting, a prompt to pique curiosity rather than turning away to the next thing in the stream as soon as the video’s over. Oh, this craft video shows a painting technique called underpainting? Time to navigate away and look for more—and more reliable—information about it.
I want to see something new. I haven’t yet figured out how to escape the current of the social-media stream. Sometimes that means finding a craft video that enrages me; other times, it means scratching the surface of some new and interesting piece of expertise that I’ve never heard of before. Sometimes I just float on by.
- Objectively the worst phrase in American English vernacular. ↩︎
- And yes, internet porn probably does factor into this equation, although it’s less overt in craft videos than it is elsewhere. Some of the less savory—and less sane—craft videos out there carry a distinct aura of the fetish about them; I’ve seen enough bare feet, lovingly shot, to know that the five-minute craft video I’m watching probably isn’t actually about the craft, but instead about objectifying the body going through the motions of that craft.
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