Thirteen: Airline Tickets (07-26-2022)
Unremarkable: Chinese Fast Food Workers Unimpressed by White Customer Ordering in Acceptably Understandable Cantonese
In a video posted to YouTube earlier this week, overweight, excessively energetic American "Epic Travels" showed off his favorite party trick of speaking relatively accurate Cantonese, presumably learned from several years of online courses. At the drive-through of a local Chinese chicken restaurant, Eric, as Epic Travels' host, ordered a double chicken bucket, spicy chicken fries, three orders of "mega" fries, and two large Coca-Colas (although the menu, visible in the background, shows Sierra Mist as an option, meaning this restaurant carries Pepsi products), using his amateur Cantonese rather than native English, a language every employee of the store is capable of speaking fluently.
Eric and his unnamed cameraman, giddy with anticipation of their "big reveal", pulled around to the pickup and payment window, where the employees calmly and quietly accepted his credit card payment and returned him his food, wishing him well in English. Eric and his cameraman, clearly dissatisfied, wish the employee well in return in Cantonese, and are returned the appropriate response of a closed drive-through window. The Chinese employee's disregard for Eric's need to excitement and bombastic behavior, with only a display of enthusiastic ethnic excitement capable of meeting the demands of his bed-bound, travel-loving audience, seemed to offend Eric, who spent the remaining fifteen minutes of YouTube ad revenue-driving runtime explaining the cultural differences between himself and the restaurant workers.
COVID-19 and the associated pandemic were not kind to the travel genre of YouTube, with travel restrictions, visa policies, and rising costs pushing many to have to abandon their dreams of international travel and instead find ways to generate exciting content at home in the United States. The challenge of keeping audiences' attention without having ethnic minorities, exotic cultures, or primitive peoples to exhibit and exploit, was ever present during the height of the pandemic, when the demand for views of the outside world was at its highest. How can an American feel complete when sitting at home when their favorite YouTuber isn't presenting them with bizarre food and confused foreigners for them to gawk at?
Thankfully, much of the world has begun reopening, and travel YouTube and its associated bit-size-content-based industry have resumed full operations. Wars in Ukraine and instabilities in Asia have not dissuaded many from resuming their work, and the internet has once again become a barrage of unconsidered demonstrations of supposedly pure local cultures, distilled regional experiences, and poor translations of distant customs. The driving force behind the choices of destination for travel content creators is the locations that will generate the most engagement, are best for YouTube (or god forbidden Tiktok) algorithms, and are most likely to trend and grow a channel's following. As such, undue attention is given to already well understood cultures in the US, or flashy war-torn, highly impoverished nations, whose presentation relies on the pity of the audience to avoid becoming full exploitation.
However, the travel YouTuber is well aware of the risks of presenting these places, of their eager grin and overzealous reactions to everyday occurrences in foreign countries, and presents every trip as a journey of self-discovery, an exploration of the diversity of the world, which of course, necessitates the presence of a camera, an ad read, and the treatment of local peoples and their culture as eye candy for lazy domestic viewers.
Nevertheless, travel content and the faux intellectuals who create it, plucking away in starred hotels adding in merchandise promotions to their videos about the horrors of Syria or the fascinating Orientalism of Japan, are the least of the world's worry. Once again, the march of technology created these people, who are no stronger than the algorithms that promote their content and drive their decisions, ripping from them the illusion of free will to become a slave to the digital machine. Along with them, the audience is dragged along, being led to believe that by nature of the diversity of the content, and the supposed necessity of foreign travels, a vestige of explorer tales and the bourgeoisie Grand Tour, that they are engaging with something of personal value. There is no solution to this- not even embarking on travel of their own will spare the audience from blame in perpetuating this industry. Someday, a technology free world will exist, in the aftermath of global crisis, where travel returns to its golden age of exploration, where exotic lands could only be accessed through difficult journeys and understood through extensive immersive study. Maybe then, no one will feel the need to torment minimum-wage workers with their unimpressive ability to speak in broken Cantonese.