Be radicalized by travel vlogging

The comment appears under a video by South African YouTuber Kurt Caz, followed by more than 4.1 million subscribers. A well-established figure in travel vlogging, he made his name six years ago by filming himself sometimes at a barber in Hanoi, sometimes on board a train crossing the Balkans.

For a long time, the alternative travel vlog has embodied one of the most seductive promises of YouTube: showing the world in its raw state, far from the marked circuits and the somewhat cheesy images of the Canal Escape.

Camera in hand, an entire generation of videographers has established a way of traveling guided by audacity and the unexpected. We see them toasting with homemade vodka in Chukotka, helping out Tanzanian scrap dealers or sharing a meal with a Uyghur family.

Then, as ratings climbed, destinations slid into ever more perilous, and inevitably, ever more spectacular territories.

48 hours with the most dangerous gang in Port-au-Prince.
A night inside the worst Taliban prison.
Escape from an illegal mine in Bolivia.

But in recent years, the phenomenon has taken another tangent, carried by some of the same figures, including Kurt Caz, who helped to make the genre shine. A subculture made up of videographers who take up the codes of “raw” travel to divert its spirit. It is no longer the encounter that guides the camera, but the denunciation.

Both on YouTube and on the platforms of reelsthese videographers now roam the touristy or deemed dangerous neighborhoods of large cities to exhibit the symptoms: drug addiction, marginality, pickpockets, scams, illegal immigration. In short, an insecurity that they showcase as much as they document it.

Where the pioneers of the genre sought the strangeness of the world in a humanist approach to travel writing, this new generation especially tracks its fractures.

It promises to show what traditional media or politicians would refuse to reveal: the dark side of Western metropolises. A decline that, according to its authors, everyone would suffer, without ever daring to document it.

Unsurprisingly, supported by already established communities, this mechanism hits the mark: millions of views, thousands of comments, often polarized and sometimes frankly worrying.

A phenomenon which is gaining popularity in Europe, this shift led me to speak with Daniel Trottier, professor at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and originally from Montreal, he is one of the great specialists in digital vigilantism.

“If you go to a small, remote region of Southeast Asia, the gesture doesn’t carry the same political charge as when you film yourself pointing the finger, or even demonizing, a major European capital,” he explains. There, we move into something much more symbolically charged, which resonates well beyond the simple travel story, on a global scale. »

For Trottier, these videos cannot be read in isolation. They are part of a larger digital ecosystem, where the logic of visibility, indignation and virality feed each other.

Among the figures in this vlog in “POV verité” mode, we find the Briton Charles Veitch and his compatriot Curtis Arnold, the Frenchman ChristianthekingTV, the Italians Simone Carabella and Cicalone Simone, as well as the Americans Tyler Oliveira and Nick Shirley. They all claim to be citizen journalism, in a version more Le Jar than Bald and Bankrupt.

With his videos accusing – without solid evidence – daycares operated by Somali immigrants of fraud, Nick Shirley greatly contributed to triggering a political storm in Minneapolis that resulted in a massive ICE presence and the deaths of two protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

While some videographers surround themselves with bodyguards, many rely on their own “alpha” aura. Dutch Travel Maniac has the build of a hooligan. The Australian Spanian, a former inmate, impresses with his colossus physique. Cicalone comes from boxing, Carabella from bodybuilding. Always men.

Unlike the vulnerable tourist, they put themselves on stage, like explorers ready to confront crime where the state has deserted. But what they produce now has little to do with travel.

Wonder has given way to patrol.

The camera no longer travels. She watches.

“What is striking is not only the content of these videos, but the way in which they are framed,” explains Daniel Trottier. The implicit narrative almost always amounts to the same thing: “Citizens are left to their own devices. And I intervene.”

Traditionally, vigilantism refers to well-identified ideological movements: self-defense militias, moral brigades or far-right groups seeking to impose their own conception of social order. Individuals who act because they no longer trust the police, the media or institutions.

Today, however, the phenomenon is part of a broader change. “The boundaries between citizen justice and monetizable spectacle are becoming increasingly blurred,” observes the researcher.

In these videos, every tense interaction becomes a content opportunity. Conflict, insecurity and violence serve as a narrative engine. Public space is bent to their intentions to feed the click machine. Reality becomes raw material, a buffet of images serving the attention economy. A burst of visual shocks which often opens each capsule.

By orchestrating a veritable pornography of urban misery, these vlogs create a truncated reality, all the more persuasive because it presents itself as a simple capture of the world as it is.

We are less in a documentary than in a political rhetoric wrapped in a field aesthetic. Beneath this veneer of “raw truth”, the underbelly of a far-right agenda protrudes everywhere. A “them against us” which is part of a worldview tinged with anti-immigration sentiment, and which fuels a broader movement of polarization.

In a climate of growing distrust of traditional media, this simulacrum of raw truth becomes, for the general public, a credible reading of the world. The shaky, poorly framed, grainy image becomes proof. If the image is dirty, it must be true.

“At a time when there is a lot of talk about AI-generated content, the implicit message is often: don’t watch this, watch this. “That’s real,” explains the professor, echoing the famous dilemma of the blue and red pills.

A statement that is all the more paradoxical given that some creators themselves use AI. “There are already documented cases where images have been altered to make a neighborhood appear more Muslim than it really is.â€

These videos are therefore based on simple economic logic. Cause outrage to generate clicks. The famous rage bait, sociopolitical version.

In terms of numbers, it can pay off big. “If these creators manage to build real empires on YouTube, it’s because there is almost a science to growth on these platforms.”

“I don’t always know what comes first,” admits Trottier. “Ideology or economic incentive.”

In such an attention economy, popularity risks becoming the only compass to trust. Following this logic, the end often ends up justifying the means: monetizing the chaos they themselves help to cause, to finance the next video, and so on.

The journey promised to understand the world. These videos now promise to judge him.

“What worries me most is the way in which young people are exposed to this type of content,” explains Trottier.

Even taken with hindsight, these videos end up directing our view of the world, observes the professor. And I see it myself: after hours spent consuming this subculture, the gaze shifts, almost without knowing it.

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t real crime. The subject is current here in the Netherlands. But these videos often show the most extreme angle. »

If the platforms have tried to impose certain limits, the incentive remains strong. “If this type of content generates five million views, as long as you’re not openly committing a crime, it’s okay.”

And the phenomenon is proving difficult to contain. “If they get banned or lose sponsors, these creators can immediately present themselves as victims and attract even more attention.”

Quebec seems, for the moment, relatively spared from the phenomenon. The province still does not have a real “star” of patrol vlogging, nor a passage marking the figures mentioned above, who come to survey the harshest areas of our cities, or certain indigenous and Inuit communities, camera at the front, to transform into a spectacle the realities which precipitate part of the population into the precariousness.

This does not mean that the phenomenon is absent. Several social network accounts, often anonymous, are already broadcasting videos of altercations captured in the metro or in the city center. This is not structured vlogging, but a form of raw vigilantism, social media version: we film a drug addict in crisis to get views, without editing or context, and the comments are rarely kind.

In Montreal, the current climate could, however, offer fertile ground for this type of content: opioid crisis, encampments, endemic racism, growing feeling of insecurity in the metro. All it would take is a charismatic creator, ready to push logic to its limits, for the model to take hold here too.

All, of course, in the name of a West presented as collapsing.