Tom Guarriello compares YouTube's early community to Deadwood, the HBO show about a lawless 1890s frontier town. Like Deadwood's miners and saloonkeepers, YouTube users are figuring out rules and civil behavior from scratch. The YouTube Street Team is emerging as a governance body to mediate conflicts and set boundaries.
Hey guys, it's Tom. I've been watching several videos recently. Just watched Cross Mack, watched, of course, watched Argent009. Of course, I watched Peppermint Patty disappear. And, you know, lots of us are getting, of course, pretty exercised about what's going on here. And, you know, it made me think of— I don't know if you guys watch Deadwood on HBO, but Deadwood's a really cool show. And it's a cool show for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons that it's a cool show is that it really shows what it's like to try to civilize a new territory, try to get places to have a community of people who respect one another, and how that develops. You know, you have— so, so it takes place in like the 1890s, I think it is, in the Dakota Territories. And, you know, it's still gold rush time out there. You know, it's past that first gold rush in San Francisco, but it's still gold rush time. And there's still people coming in to all of these mining areas just out there to make a fortune. And so there's these towns that sprung up, Deadwood being a real town, being one of them, where you know, you had all kinds of people coming in looking to make their fortune. And so you had not just the miners, but you had all the folks who were there to try to create the services and things that miners wanted. So you had, you know, of course you had saloons. That's one of the big characters is Swearingen, Al Swearingen, who's a saloonkeeper. Also— his saloon is also a brothel. You've got casinos, you've got storekeepers, you've got— now in several seasons into Deadwood, you've got a theater company, you've got a lot of, you've got a lot of things. And you've got the sheriff, you know, you got the sheriff who's there, Sheriff Bullock, in, in Deadwood. And, you know, the thing about— one of the things that made Deadwood that for me makes Deadwood interesting is that justice in Deadwood is fast and it's mostly fair. Mostly fair. People get punished sometimes in Deadwood who really, you know, were kind of half honest and kind of half not honest, and they happen to maybe just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that's the way it goes. It's a, I think, a great metaphor for part of what we're trying to see happen here, which is how do we get a community built where people can express themselves within the boundaries of civilization? And what are those boundaries? Eh, they get slippery out here, they get slippery over there. Do I have a right to call you fat? Do you have a right to call me stupid? Do I have a right— all that stuff, all that stuff is there. I have a right to come after you because I don't like your lifestyle or whatever. Um, that— those are the rules that are being established. It's hard to do. It's hard to figure it out. That's our job here. Part of our job here is to figure that out. Obviously, uh, we see that the YouTube Street Team is about to, um, spring into, into life, and maybe, you know, we'll have places to go where we can talk to one another about stuff we don't like and help to resolve the kind of disputes that are inevitably going to spring up around here. So, um, you know, my two cents on this is it's early in the civilization process for us, guys, and, uh, it ain't pretty. It ain't pretty. Take it easy. See you soon.
