“All these people use the exact same words: ‘soul-searching,’ ‘creative minds,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘passion projects,’ ‘finding the essence of life.’ They’re all just excuses to be lazy.”
In QUIT YOUR JOB AND TRAVEL FOREVER!!, Cody Ko spends a full 14 minutes and 26 seconds ripping apart wealthy influencers who use their money, often from unknown origins, to fund elaborate trips to remote destinations and create content that falsely makes their lifestyle seem well within reach for the average person. Keeping in line with the theme of other videos on his channel, Ko focuses his efforts on one particular influencer — fellow YouTuber and Instagram influencer Tyler Johnson (known across the internet by his screen name Crea Tyler), who rose to fame shortly after releasing a since-deleted YouTube video titled College Dropout which encouraged teens his age to follow in his footsteps to drop out of college and achieve a lifestyle rife with Beverly Hills-style mansions, pool parties, and destination vacations.
Johnson is undoubtedly one of the more outrageous examples of this class of influencers, given the fact that he was exposed years after his rise to fame for scamming other teenagers into making monthly payments to be part of an exclusive club that claimed to give them a lifestyle similar to the one Johnson appeared to be enjoying online. Ko’s channel tends to single out individuals like Johnson, who have achieved fame (or, more often, infamy) by doing something Ko’s audience of mostly teenage viewers might find embarrassing, in a wildly popular series of YouTube videos known as “That’s Cringe.”
Although I was certainly entertained by Ko’s exaggerated disgust at Johnson’s antics in QUIT YOUR JOB AND TRAVEL FOREVER!!, I found two main points of irony given that Ko is a massively successful social media star and entertainer himself. Firstly, Ko’s rise to success has largely been a result of ribbing other creators for their wealth and influencer status — two things he himself shares with them. And yet, Ko is lauded by his audience for staying humble and down-to-earth compared to these other creators, all while he continues filming out of his multimillion-dollar Venice Beach home. More subtly, I found it ironic that Ko uses a YouTube video — by definition a medium of popular culture — to rag on someone attempting to appear immersed in high culture.
Ko’s videos often contain clips from other creators’ content, which brings to mind German philosopher and associate of the Frankfurt School Walter Benjamin’s best-known work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Putting aside the fact that Benjamin would probably in the first place disapprove of Ko’s medium of choice, given Benjamin’s dislike of film (a mechanical reproduction in itself) as a form of art, what would he think of Ko’s strategy of “remixing” other people’s content? Despite the inauthenticity in making fun of other creators for a characteristic he shares with them, I would argue that Benjamin would consider Ko’s work authentic as a piece of performance art. Although it is taking inspiration from other content, it is not claiming to reproduce or achieve the same purpose of the original video; the message of the original video is to encourage teens to pursue their dream lifestyle, and Ko’s video exposes the inaccessibility of this type of lifestyle in an entertaining manner. Benjamin’s philosophy regarding reproduction is as follows: “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (Benjamin, 1936). The “domain of tradition” Benjamin refers to is the theoretical space which a culturally significant object occupies — it describes how it affects and is affected by other culturally significant objects. Ko’s witty criticisms of Johnson’s work in a well-produced video reveal his skill as a comedian and entertainer, which allows him to create a work with its own “aura” and domain of tradition distinct from that of the original video.
Although QUIT YOUR JOB AND TRAVEL FOREVER!!, which has received over 6.3 million views, was only uploaded in early 2018, Ko is far from irrelevance in the present day. With 5.78 million subscribers and counting, he continues to upload twice a week, and each of his videos regularly hits over a million views in just a few days. Ko’s oldest video, with hundreds of thousands of views, is from seven years ago, reflecting an ability to stay relevant for years that’s anomalous amongst other creators on the platform. In Malcolm Gladwell’s words in his New Yorker article The Coolhunt, Ko has stayed well within the “hermeneutic circle of cool” (Gladwell, 1997), a phenomenon where the uncool can’t identify what’s cool and cool can’t even be described to them. The concept is particularly relevant to YouTubers who have been on the platform for a while — after a few years, older YouTubers’ content becomes uninteresting to viewers, who consistently remain within the teenage age range, as they exit the hermeneutic circle of cool. For years, Ko has managed to stay within the circle and capture the attention of new users entering the platform by changing his content to suit the tastes of this group, which decides what’s cool and what’s not by exercising their power as consumers.
What makes Ko’s skill in staying ahead of this cool cutting edge so impressive is the fact that “the act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on” (Gladwell, 1997). As he keeps updating his content style and even migrating to podcasts, music videos, Twitch, TikTok, etc., these forms of media and content styles go in and out of fashion, making his ability to stay on top of trends and his resulting status as a YouTube icon all the more remarkable. And by extension, as a video that’s fairly representative of the rest of his content, QUIT YOUR JOB AND TRAVEL FOREVER!! is equally remarkable in its relevance as a commentary on the influencer lifestyle even three years later — an unheard-of amount of time for anything to stay relevant in the ever-changing ‘cool industry.’
References
Benjamin, W. (1936). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Visual Culture: Experiences in Visual Culture.
Gladwell, Malcolm. (1997). The Coolhunt. The New Yorker, 78- 88.
Kolodziejzyk, Cody. (2018, January 9). QUIT YOUR JOB AND TRAVEL FOREVER!! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDugAaJy4zM
Sarika,
ReplyDeleteI think your analysis of Cody Ko as an emblem of the coolhunting cycle is incredibly interesting and well articulated. To further that point, I believe that Cody Ko’s videos reify the distinction between cool and uncool, as he asserts himself to be the former and the content creators he criticizes to be the latter. In doing so, Ko buys into the coolhunting cycle that is predicated on the existence of this distinction.
I also think Cody Ko’s videos parallel some of the same elements as fan fiction as described by Henry Jenkins. Although fanfiction is obviously characterized by affinity and Cody Ko’s videos intend to make fun of the original work, the way that he interacts with the media is remarkably similar to the way fans do when creating fanfiction. For one, Cody Ko’ “That’s Cringe” series plays with an original video but breaks it up into pieces that he then adds on to with his own humorous commentary- what Jenkins would likely consider an example of “textual poaching”. Jenkins describes textual poaching as the notion that fans can reclaim “worthless” work and manipulate these works to fit their visions, where readers raid the content and collect “only those things that seem useful of pleasurable to the reader.” (Jenkins 1988, p.86) This is exactly what Cody Ko does in his videos, being that his content is almost entirely based on taking the content that others have created and reworking it to fit his comedic vision.
Moreover, Cody Ko’s content blurs the line between producing and consuming- similar to fanfiction writing. His videos are an amalgamation of original and borrowed material just like fanfiction texts. Perhaps what is most entertaining about his content is the constant back-and forth- between him and the original creator, with stark changes in attitudes between them. In the same vein, fanfiction’s value lies in the contrast between the original and borrowed text.
Aly Kerrigan