YouTube Face is "everywhere you look" on the site, writes Joe Veix: the exaggerated leering, lurching, laughing mugshots used by virtually every YouTuber seeking a mass audience, slapped on as the thumbnail for every last video.
Taken cumulatively, there’s a surreal, Lynchian quality to the images. Few things could ever be exciting enough to elicit these kinds of reactions, and no one could possibly be this expressive. So what’s wrong with these people? Were their brains tenderized? No, worse. YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form.
YouTube Face emerged bottom-up from the click-kettle of YouTube's ad-revenue hunger games: it is dumb, constantly subject to change as the market adapts, and shockingly effective. Compare to Dreamworks Face, a top-down creation of marketing psychologists. unchanging and mostly useless.
"So begins the Great Brand Singularity," Veix concludes. "Corporations, humans, and machines merging in a banal orgy of commerce."
