While YouTube has given rise to a new generation of celebrity and provided opportunities for young, self-made artists and entrepreneurs, it's still increasingly obvious that these kid-next-door vloggers are becoming more and more out of touch.
Photo Credit: JaackMaate/YouTube
YouTube started out as a great platform for people to share their talent, but if you've become disenfranchised by the content we see on the streaming site these days, you're certainly not alone. The fact that children and young adults will sit for hours watching their favourite vlogger sorting through the pile of freebies they've received in their PO box, before being lured in by a clickbait "storytime" headline that will never deliver, and ending up watching some random desperate person eating tide pods or setting themselves on fire for "likes" is frankly baffling.
But there are still channels out there that have kept their feet firmly on the ground. JaackMaate, real name Jack Dean, is a 25-year-old comedian who enjoys taking the p**s out of his fellow YouTubers as well as, most importantly, himself. He is one man you can trust not to bombard you with mindless content and attention-seeking feats.
With more than one million subscribers, we like to think of him as a kind of anti-hero to viewers. He's there to tell the truth about being a YouTuber; about how much someone like him really gets paid, why he'll never jump on the pointless merch bandwagon, and how he's going to bring us all down to earth after being stuck on this virtual cloud that is the vlogosphere for far too long.
He's best known for targeting popular YouTubers for their exploitation of fans by releasing over-priced and bad quality merchandise. After Zoella released her highly-criticised £50 advent calendar in 2017, he uploaded a hilarious review showing us everything that was wrong with it.
Another popular video saw him attack her partner Alfie Deyes, aka PointlessBlog, after he uploaded a video called "Living on £1 for 24 hours". He criticised Alfie for being completely out of touch, for ignoring the fact that there are people out there forced to live on £1 a day while he trains in the gym with his personal trainer, gets deliveries of expensive filtered water, shops at Waitrose and impulse buys jewellery.
Other victims of his entertaining vitriol include Logan Paul, Bobby Misner and Oli White. All perfect examples of the kind of YouTuber Jack is never going to be. It's his honesty that's most refreshing, though; the fact that he'll never let his feelings about certain vloggers colour his view about a particular situation.
In his latest video, he turns his own aesthetic on its head by defending gaming vlogger Tom Cassell, aka Tom Syndicate, after he was criticized for alleged racist and offensive Tweets that he posted eight years ago (he would have been around 17-years-old).
The video is an exploration of cancel culture: this idea that vloggers should have their channels taken down or "cancelled" because some journalist has spent several days digging through the Twitter vaults for the slightest compromising comment. It doesn't seem to matter that these comments were usually made when they were not major social media influencers, or indeed just a naive teenager who still had a lot of growing up to do.
As Jack says, "People grow, people learn and people and change. And if you're going to constantly punish people for old opinions then you better f***ing hope that you've never said anything even slightly dodgy."
While many might like to think JaackMaate just enjoys finding the meagrest reason to lay into his fellow YouTubers, this just proves that he's actually more concerned with honesty and integrity than you might think.
Tagged in YouTube