Youtube Nation: Your Best Friend Zack

Of all the totally not true, quasi-intellectual bits of wankery to which I subscribe in increasing numbers as the years go by and I become less hip, my favorite is the idea that one can cobble together a virtual family entirely from Youtube videos. Clara from the "Depression Cooking" series can be your immortal Internet grandmother, capable of whipping up a pot of pasta and peas for you even if the real-life Clara passes as all grandmothers are destined to do. You don't need to interact with your actual father when you can just catch up with Kevjumba's dad every now and then. And everyone knows your annoying brother, Phil. That guy can just go on and on about a bunch of stupid pop culture stuff and he's really opinionated, but hey, he's your brother. Whattaya gonna do? Heck, there's not even a good reason to try to maintain a real relationship with a woman when you have a standing date with a busty Russian philologist who's just brimming with interesting facts. Well, for those of you out there who have been carefully constructing your surrogate Youtube family, I'd like to introduce you to your kooky best friend, Zack Scott.

Zack Scott is one of those inexplicably prolific Youtubers who posts every week or two with pretty much whatever he wanted to record that day. That's not to say he hasn't produced some well-planned content, but most of his videos are really just home movies of a guy joking around. I can't really say most of his Youtube uploads are entertaining, at least not in the way professional media or even the most well-made Youtube videos are entertaining. But it's pretty clear that Zack Scott isn't trying to be the next big Youtube sensation or become some future TV star.

And yet, Zack has found himself in some pretty nice stepping stone positions to a fairly cushy life in marketing. Still a professional electrical engineer, Zack Scott has done some real-person advertising work as a direct result of his half decade of making videos and putting them on the Internet. How does this happen? User-generated content is such a new field that there isn't a whole lot of hard data about how it connects to life outside the myriad little bubbles of media on the Web. How is it that a guy who isn't really aiming for a particular outcome or even actively pursuing anything directly related to it can just slip into that outcome merely as a matter of course?

I think perhaps it's just a matter of being around long enough to be the guy who everyone assumes knows what he's doing. If you're that guy for even a little while, you probably know more than you were aware you knew. Producing content for the Internet, whatever that content happens to be, is a weird little exercise. The amount of work that goes into it is almost never duly compensated and so no matter what it's always something of a hobby. Hell, on his website Zack Scott still refers to his Youtube habits as a hobby. That's a big part of why I don't fault him for making videos of himself pretending to shred on a guitar and goofing around with his cat. It's just a hobby, something the guy does because he enjoys it. I'm not going to fault him for that, just like I'm not going to fault a guy who whittles just because I don't want to display the little horses he makes out of oak in my home. But I imagine that if the whittler keeps at it for long enough and enough people see those stupid oak horses, someone in the wood horse figurine market might just offer him a contract. Why? Because he's the guy who whittles wood horse figurines. Look, he's got over a hundred of the damn things in his garage.

I wish Zack Scott well. If some major corporation wants to hire him to market their product, I'm all for it. It'll at least be one less commercial created by someone who got their spiffy ad agency job with a bullshit business degree and no real understanding of what people really like. Even if Zack's just having a laugh by making home movies of his cats, he still seems like a nice enough guy. In fact, I think he and I could be friends. Best friends. Forever.