Boobs on the Tube

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination bills itself as “the definitive, deeply reported account of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy.”

Written by Mark Bergen, a technology reporter at Bloomberg, the book looks to “reveal the inside story of YouTube’s technology and business” and how YouTube aided Google in its rise to “unimaginable power.”

Bergen begins by rather excellently summarizing the frenzied early days of YouTube, chronicling the creation of the company by its founders Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen while also providing a rare honest insight into the long-forgotten reality of tech startups (particularly in the early 2000s).

Tales of ideological disagreement, frantic and confused initial development, and even early offices “teeming with rats” are nicely intertwined, guiding the reader to the turning point in both YouTube’s timeline and the tone of the book itself: Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of the video platform.

The book continues in its attempt to distill the undeniably dense and complex history of YouTube in the years that followed, digging into the sheer scale of YouTube’s infrastructure (and therefore the challenges that arose surrounding advertising, storage, and content moderation), Google’s response (or lack thereof) as Congress grew more wary of Big Tech, and the impact of era-defining events on the Silicon Valley giant, such as the Arab Spring, the deadly Christchurch shootings, and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.

But in many ways, Like, Comment, Subscribe in its entirety could be viewed as a metaphor for YouTube itself: brimming with fascinating nuggets of information, but also bloated with pseudo-information and held together under the guise of false objectivity.

Like YouTube’s pivotal shift from “view count” to obsessively fueling “watch time,” there’s a feeling of anecdotal padding throughout the book in the form of editorialized and sometimes irrelevant tales of various YouTube creators.

Some of these examples tie inextricably into the high-level development of YouTube itself and were demonstrable of the various challenges and scandals that appeared as significant policy potholes along the way. Figures like PewDiePie, Logan Paul (both YouTube megastars with their own experiences of controversy), and Nasim Najafi Aghdam (the woman who carried out an attack on YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters in 2018, wounding three people before killing herself) were all understandably included, as was an overview of the explosion of multichannel conglomerates that used (and sometimes abused) creators in YouTube’s