A few days ago – procrastinating on my novel – I opened Youtube. Since deleting my social media accounts at the start of this year, Youtube has been the place I click to when I need to zone out.
I scrolled listlessly through my subscriptions, finding a video uploaded recently by a guy named Jack Howard. I blink, squint, think: Whoa. Throwback.
I subscribed to him years ago (and I mean years ago – probably 2012 or 2013). This was back when he was making sketch comedy videos with his best friend Dean Dobbs – when Youtube was still in its larval stage, shapeless and pink and brimming with potential.
It’s been years since I watched any of his videos. But again, I was procrastinating. My chapter draft was safely minimized, and I had already watched everything else. So I clicked, and I watched.
Jack talks about what he’s been up to, but before he begins he addresses the years that have passed in between: “It’s crazy to me that somebody watching this video might have been watching my videos back in 2012.” He points to the camera. “You were a child then. You might have a child now.”
There’s a strange subtext to the sentiment — one that prickles beneath the crust of my subconscious long after I finish the video and get back to work on my draft.
~
A few days later my friend comes over to my apartment. We sit on the couch devouring a bowl of massive, nightdark blueberries, catching up in the fluid, amorphous way we normally do. She has brought a stack of books for me to borrow while she’s away in Budapest for the next six months; we flip through them. There’s a Bukowski novel that I haven’t read. She tells me a very funny anecdote about how she acquired that particular book. The conversation shifts to her teenage years, a sexcapade in London… and then, serendipitously, the fact that she happened to watch this same Jack Howard video the day I saw it – thinking, just as I did, wow, I had forgotten about him.
It’s like a dam bursts. We take mugs of tea to my bedroom, close the door, and begin to dish. Though we’ve been friends for several years already, neither of us knew that we shared a teenage hyperfixation on not only Jack Howard, but the group of friends that began to shape Youtube into what it is now, starting in 2012.
Dan and Phil and Dodie and Hazel and PJ and Chris and Jack and Dean and Fin and Jack and Hannah and Savannah and Bertie –
All of whom were in their early twenties at the time, when the majority of their subscribers (like me), were fourteen, or fifteen or younger. Almost all of them were British. Almost all their fans were girls. They were cool primarily because they were cool online, in a time when this was a relatively new way of making a name for yourself.
We lay on our sides and relay every piece of information about this friend group that we had. It had been years since either of us had kept up with any of these people. And yet the lore of that time period had been inscribed within us, waiting to be retrieved. To this day we both contained a vault of – let’s be honest – very niche, definitely unimportant information about people we only knew through a screen. Timelines and data and dating and breakups, breakdowns and big news and projects and tears1.
My personal fixation was on a Youtuber named PJ Ligouri, or kickthepj, as I still refer to him. He, in my mind, was different from the rest. He wasn’t an influencer or comedian (though I did find him very funny). He was, first and foremost, a filmmaker.
Throughout most of my early life, I thought that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wrote wildly ambitious films when I was twelve and thirteen, recruited my friends and family to be part of them. I got more serious about it when I was in high school, and then I went to film school. (I even worked in the industry briefly before burning out – you know, the classic. But this essay isn’t about any of that).
I was vastly inspired by PJ. His films were creative in the makeshift way that encouraged a lot of my early work. During high school I even thought about applying to the same university that he went to.
There was also the fact that I had a massive, supremely embarrassing crush on him2, though the crush was one with muddy edges. Was I attracted to him because of his creativity, or because I thought he was hot?
Many years later I would learn about the sacral chakra. Spiritually, it’s linked to both sexuality and creativity. (Sometimes, when we meet people that engage us creatively, we’ll mistake that feeling for sexual attraction, and vice versa. They are parallel realms, like the realms of digital and real life – their edges are malleable, a matter of perspective.) With this information it’s easy to thread truth through my crush. I was in a sort of larval stage myself. At fifteen my bisexuality was mostly a secret, intensely theorized, scarcely practiced. I desperately wanted to have a boyfriend but had no idea what that would actually look like. However, I also wanted to be an artist; wanted to live a life overflowing with creativity. My creativity and sexuality felt – at times, still – like a supernova burning inside me. Now I know how to channel it; back then I didn’t. As a result this scalding force flowed outward, latching onto people I didn’t know.
It wasn’t just PJ. It was all of them, really.
They were far out of my reach, both literally and figuratively. They lived on the other side of the world. In my mind they had essentially transcended onto a different plane – one that, back then, was thrilling and foreign and impossible to conceptualize. But they weren’t special. They were just in their early 20’s, in a time when I was not.
As my friend pointed out: we’re older now than they were then. I’m 26, she’s 27. Many of the Youtubers in this group were 22, give or take a few years. When I look at it this way – recalling the stumbling, stupid, yearning version of myself at 22 – the lore takes a different cast.
~
Seemingly self-aware, the boys (and most of them were boys) poked fun, prodded the edges of their audience’s parasocial bond. They knew that their fans were primarily teenage girls with hungry eyes and blocked chakras and accounts on fanfiction.net. PJ and his best friend Chris (another Youtuber - crabstickz) made videos where they leaned into fan theories. Dan and Phil, obviously, also need to be mentioned – their friendship became the inspiration of some pretty terrifying and/or legendary works of fiction3. All four of them – Dan, Phil, Chris, PJ – would often hang out during this time, filming videos together; calling themselves ‘The Fantastic Foursome,’ playing Twister, making jokes about making out.
They knew what they were doing. They knew what we wanted to see.
Their notoriety, I believe, wouldn’t have been so prevalent if it wasn’t the fact of this parasocial relationship going both ways – the fans and the creators feeding each other, creating, in some strange astral pocket of the universe, intense relationships that weren’t real but also were. Because isn’t that the crux of it? They were the creators. Stoking our minds, drafting something bigger. Their ability to forge the illusion that they were all in a relationship together – platonic or otherwise – gave them power, but it also gave us power too. They can joke that they raised us, but really it was us that raised them.
~
I’ve tried going back and watching some of my favorite videos uploaded during this time period. But I can’t sit through them. It’s impossible. It’s like the subjects are speaking a language that’s long since died out. Why is it that these videos feel so embarrassing to watch now, now that I’m in my mid-20’s?
I would argue that it’s not these people that were embarrassing, nor their videos. It’s the fact that these videos, these personas, hold within them an ancient text of teenage cringe, pressed and buried deep inside me, inside us. We don’t want to go there again, because we aren’t there again. At least I hope not.
These videos are a sort of fossil. Relics – important. They are a touchstone of culture, a blip in the grand fabric of our world, our youth. To revisit these people would be to revisit ourselves – the ones who wrote fanfiction, the ones that fantasized about being a part of a group. Hopelessly infatuated, ridiculous, wanting.
It’s embarrassing to remember a time when we wanted to be part of something bigger. Maybe it would have been less cringe to just believe in God4 instead.
~
My friend told me that, funnily enough, she had actually met Jack Howard. He was in Helsinki for some reason back in 2014. He posted online saying he was having a meetup in front of the central railway station. The ‘meet-up’ was, according to my friend, intensely, immensely awkward. Jack stood surrounded by teenage girls, all of whom were too self-conscious about their English to talk to him. Eventually he asked if anyone wanted autographs and everyone flooded forward.
When I imagine this scenario, I imagine someone much older – properly famous and established. But Jack was 22, and known simply because he made funny videos on Youtube. What must that have felt like – to be that age with primarily teenage girls for fans, known only for the work he made on a platform that hadn’t fully launched? Must have been weird.5 Must have been really, really weird.
PS:
Oh man. This one was tough to write. Like I genuinely felt embarrassed while working on it, simply because of all the memories and feelings it brought back. But if the conversation with my friend told me anything, its that this niche obsession was not as niche as I thought it was at the time. Writing something uncomfortable usually means that you’re writing something true.
Also, if this was your experience as well, I would love to start a discussion in the comments!! Don’t be shy :)
xx Sidney
definitely foreshadowing - how much unimportant information from social media do we carry around right now?
like I genuinely still feel so embarrassed about it … lowkey cannot believe I’m writing about it here
if you know, you know
JOKING OBV
there was a lot of shady stuff going on with this dynamic as well, which is pretty well documented. However, this was not my experience at the time, and unpacking all of that is enough for an essay of its own.