Labor, Production, and Value in YouTube Building Explainers
Architects Also Do D.I.Y.
When architects labor on our own homes, our professional training is a mixed blessing. We’re likely to overthink the context of a task, equipped with just enough understanding to recognize how badly we handle our tools and materials. This echoes architects’ wider relationships with builders: over-provided with esoteric ideas and a sense of our own cultural worth; while under-equipped with practical wisdom. Like many homeowners, and doubtless other architects, I find myself regularly tuning-in to YouTube building explainers when working on my own house. As I watch craftspeople in action, I frequently experience both self-reproach – for not knowing how to do something practically that I understand primarily in abstract terms – and an ever-expanding respect for the knowledge and embodied understanding of skilled trades.
YouTube building explainers comprise a university of experience. Lifelong knowledge, acumen and technique gets patiently distilled, shared so that the inexperienced can, for example, learn to fit an anchor bolt, fill cracks in timber, or repair plasterboard. Yet university architecture schools and academics typically ignore the presence of this absorbing corpus of wisdom, made freely available.
This short article recognizes the online academy of YouTube building explainers, which spans construction and design. Specifically, I will examine one UK-based, English-language online channel named The Gosforth Handyman. The channel is presented by builder Andy Mac and it currently has 285,000 subscribers (at the time of writing in November 2024). I will study here how video explainers like those of Andy Mac simultaneously disrupt, reinforce and extend relations between labor and design in the production of built space. And I hope to explore the cultural consequences of such videos.
Figure 1. As of 1 November 2024, the Gosforth Handyman YouTube channel consists of 396 videos which have been viewed over 42 million times. Video #151, “How to fix REALLY HEAVY things to walls”.
Economy, knowledge and building professionals
Design became increasingly separated from manufacturing in the UK and other industrializing countries throughout the nineteenth century. The craft of seamstresses, joiners and stonemasons, among others, became re-directed away from designing with tools-in-hand to, instead, the accurate reproduction of given designs. In construction, this shift was paralleled by the emergence (or re-emergence) of the figure of the architect, cast as designer and supervisor of works. This separation of design and making took place overwhelmingly along class lines, with supposedly-gentlemen architects directing the efforts of largely working-class labor.[1]
This familiar story lasted into, and persisted throughout, the twentieth century.
It was accompanied by the increasing professionalization of architecture – alongside the emergence of cognate professionals in engineering, surveying and quantity surveying – until all these professions grew to require graduate qualifications. During this time, as Christine Wall and Sérgio Ferro have shown, economic value became increasingly attached to design over construction.
Design expertise thus became a commodity, rooted in both financial and cultural capital. Professional knowledge became specialized through esoteric vocabularies and obstruse drawing conventions, regulations and standards. As Jeremy Till has illustrated, the bureaucratic structure thus erected around the construction professions served to consolidate and protect the status of professional designers. This has grown to the point where someone un-initiated typically has to hire a professional to guide them through the organizational, bureaucratic and legal complexities which have been established with the encouragement of professional bodies. There has also been an accompanying specialization of trades in construction. Such specialization has largely denied site labor the ability to know a whole project, and therefore to provide an alternative comprehensive source of design knowledge to the professionals.
At the turn of our new millennium, the rise of the internet and the so-called information economy made knowledge more widely available among those with resources to afford a device and a connection. The internet has potentially opened-up professional knowledge of construction and design widely, including through text and video explainers. These have potential to democratize professional knowledge by making it extensively available, disrupting longstanding hierarchies and hegemonies. However, the new structures – like older professional ones – also contain prospects for monetization, power and profit. Nick Srnicek argues that: “Pieties about an ‘age of access’ are just empty rhetoric”. Referring to online platforms like Uber or JustEat who profit from casualization and the so-called gig economy, Phil Jones reflects that: “The brutal tectonics of platform capital are reshaping the already desolate global landscape of labor into a grey hinterland of casual and petty employment”. The structural effects of platforms like Facebook and TikTok – and indeed YouTube – are arguably more covert than platforms like Uber or JustEat. They work similarly, however, to overlay newer mechanisms for the control and extraction of capital, and the atomization of labor, over older ones.
YouTube was purchased by Google – now Alphabet – in 2006. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green remark: “From launch, YouTube presented itself as a neutral webservice for sharing and viewing content, rather than as a content producer itself.” It projected the image of “a platform for amateur and professional production and distribution, creative consumption, fandom [...] and critique.” This image of YouTube downplays the platform’s integral monetization structures. As Burgess and Green note, YouTube performs “a content discovery role, attracting the attention of audiences, and in turn offering some content contributors revenue streams from advertising sold on the website.” At the core of its financial model, they suggest, remains a “commercial imperative [for YouTube] to be seen to support its core cultural logics of community, authenticity, and [so-called] vernacular culture.” “Participatory culture,” Burgess and Green reflect, “is YouTube’s main business.”
“YouTube building explainers comprise a university of experience.”
Figure 2. The Gosforth Handyman videos dispense both practical wisdom and cultural capital. The same voice – seemingly practical, calm and expert – merges design with production knowledge. Video #291, “How to PROPERLY re-silicone a shower".
The Gosforth Handyman channel
As of 1 November 2024, the Gosforth Handyman YouTube channel consists of 396 videos which have been viewed over 42 million times. All are presented by Andy Mac. The channel was begun in 2015. Older videos largely demonstrate construction techniques, providing tips for novices based on the presenter’s site experience as an odd-job man and small contractor. Evoking D.I.Y. traditions, the videos open-up construction to a wider community. The audience extends well beyond those already educated in building and design. Indeed, the videos are potentially available across class, genders and ethnicities – and across national borders where language and the global politics of platform access permit.
Andy Mac calls his primary sequence of films a “Tips Library.” For example, episode #151 from 2018 is titled “How to fix REALLY HEAVY things to walls.” It explains wall bolts, or sleeve anchors. Running for just over 14 minutes, the video has had 2.4m. views, 18,000 likes, and 649 comments. Narrated by the handyman over a sequence of long shots and close-ups, the video carefully and calmly introduces how the fixings work, explains wall types, discusses tools necessary, and follows the fitting of a bolt in a series of steps. Links are provided under the video to various tools and products mentioned.
Episode #291 from 2021 has a 24-minute run-time, with the same familiar structure. It is titled “How to PROPERLY Re-silicone a Shower.” The video discusses suitable tools to use, work required to prepare surfaces, where to seal and where not to seal, common failures, and basic principles. Another step-by-step sequence then follows the sealing of joints. A product placement for Fugi silicone formers is casually introduced, including a weblink. The video has over 3.1 million views, 34,000 likes, and 1045 comments. Later video sequences bridge from practical technique into design. They step from the realm of trades, and the D.I.Y. hobbyist, into the territory of the architect, surveyor and engineer. These include videos on kitchen and bathroom design, for example, and structural steelwork.
These sequences trace property development projects that Andy Mac has undertaken. A playlist of 47 videos from 2021-2024, titled “1920s Semi Renovation”, covers the repair and alteration of a small house. Explainers include how to use SketchUp software to make plans and kitchen layouts, identifying and fixing damp problems, a bathroom makeover, and installing a wood burning stove. A further sequence of seven videos, from 2021, titled “Past Renovation Projects,” focuses particularly on Andy Mac’s property development, explaining how he has bought and refurbished properties to sell at a profit.
The videos dispense both practical wisdom and cultural capital. The same voice – seemingly practical, calm and expert – merges design with production knowledge, collapsing together building, drafting and development. The Gosforth Handyman channel thus re-orders knowledges and practices previously imagined as distinct. The videos make design and construction knowledge more widely available, and help people to draw and make for themselves.
Despite their democratizing voice, the videos nevertheless remain rooted in capitalist productivity. Indeed, the presenter is making online content that yields additional monetization of his existing property development business. Product placement of tools – presumably paid – becomes more frequent in later videos. Sponsored tool review videos supplement the main playlists, including, for example, reviews of a DeWalt Combi Drill and a Husqvarna cordless hedge trimmer. In addition, viewers can make a monthly payment through the Patreon platform to become subscribers. Links – assumed to be sponsored – are provided to tool and material manufacturers. Indeed, a webpage invites commercial sponsorship from such firms.
Like all popular YouTube channels, views and watching time result in payments to Andy Mac from advertising revenue through the platform’s monetization structures. Moreover, links at the foot of the Gosforth Handyman home page connect to the presenter’s other channels. One is named “Small Business Toolbox”. This offers 88 video explainers ranging across business banking, self-assessment of tax in the UK, and company car tax.
“The videos make design and construction knowledge more widely available, and help people to draw and make for themselves.”
Labor, production and value
The Gosforth Handyman YouTube channel, like others, relies on the attention economy and the affective labor of its online platform. The older economy of architecture and construction gets mixed-up here with the newer economy of platform capitalism. Steffen Böhm and Chris Land reflect on how the information economy relates to older economic structures. They refer to Hardt and Negri’s writing, and suggest ‘that the economy has undergone a process of “postmodernization” or “informatization” which:
has revolutionized production and necessitated new concepts of labor. [L]abor has been so completely transformed that it has become “immaterial”, meaning that the delivery of services, the creation of symbolic values associated with commodities, and communication, have become the central pillars of economic life.
YouTube building explainers, like those on the Gosforth Handyman channel, are seemingly offered as learning tools to democratize construction and design. They could be imagined as having emancipatory potential: overcoming the restrictive practices of architects and the construction experts who effectively limit access to professional knowledge, and the exclusionary bureaucratic processes of construction. However, the platforms of the information economy simultaneously insert new structures of financial and cultural capital – and of expertise – into the model of production.
Nick Srnicek remarks that:
twenty-first century capitalism has found a massive new raw material to appropriate: data. [The] platform has become an increasingly dominant way of organizing businesses so as to monopolize these data, then extract, analyze, use and sell them.
“In every case,” Srnicek continues, “collecting massive amounts of data is central to the business model and the platform provides the ideal extractive apparatus.” As both Shoshana Zuboff and Jonathan Beller have argued, online social activity – like browsing TikTok or watching YouTube – is frequently itself unpaid immaterial labor. As Srnicek argues “a tendency towards monopolisation is built into the DNA of platforms: the more numerous the users who interact on a platform, the more valuable the platform becomes for each one of them”. The provision of clicks, views, and likes collectively contributes to the hugely valuable datasets assembled by the big tech corporations, and to the salability of commodities. Viewers switch seamlessly between browsing videos and reviews, for example, buying and selling on eBay, greeting and messaging friends, sharing images on Instagram, and networking on LinkedIn – all generating profit for platforms and producers. YouTube video explainers are integrally connected into this so-called attention economy: a space where work often feigns leisure, becoming distributed online and embedded into most aspects of daily life. Such work entails the formation of different habits, and renewed subjectivities, to support the new economy. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it, this immaterial affective labor sets the “soul at work”.
Karl Marx notes, in a pivotal section of Capital volume 1, that
in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production […] the site of the labor process conducted within an employment relationship […] It is labor, and only labor, that is capable of producing surplus value.
In these video explainers, the information economy adds further kinds of construction labor to the long-established labor of trades on site, and to the design labor of the architect’s office. We now have the labor of the video producer, and the video consumer.
Producers are able to imagine themselves as self-employed entrepreneurs, running small businesses. Simultaneously, these producers are recruited to the gig economy of small and amateur makers who fuel the profits of platform capitalism. We also have the affective labor provided by online viewers, whose clicks and likes provide the platform with data, and “add value” by following links to products and services. As Böhm and Land reflect, “Marx explains how, even when labor is recompensed at its value, it can nevertheless produce ‘surplus value’ over and above that required to compensate wages.” Here, new surplus value has been found in construction knowledge, extracted by the online content producer. However, yet greater value is extracted by the platform itself, which is hugely dominant in the distribution of content.
As Böhm and Land claim about the information economy, this new labor occurs “outside the traditional confines of the workplace [and] permeate[s] cultural and social reproduction, communication, and subjectivity, connecting and organizing […] in the pursuit of economic value”. “An adequate understanding of the ‘new economy’,” they argue, “necessitates a reconceptualization of the location of value production – Marx’s ‘hidden abode’ – [because] social production and organization have themselves become […] central sources of competitive advantage and economic productivity”.
These ideas can be understood in relation to the emerging field of Production Studies in architecture. This field seeks to advance “the critical understanding of relations between architectural design and the production and labor of building.” It relates to Sérgio Ferro’s insight that “architecture’s dismissal and neglect of building labor is no mere oversight, but rather a structural necessity of capitalist development to maintain the [architecture] profession’s capacity to act ‘on’ and ‘over’ the building site.”
Against this context, it is instructive to consider construction explainer videos like those of the Gosforth Handyman. The information economy appears to allow a fresh re-assertion of the knowledges, expertise, and value of the building site. The builder-video producer is able to make design and construction knowledge more widely available, circumventing the power of the architect or professional, extracting for themselves a new value from their labor.
However, because of the dominance and structures of the platform, this can seemingly only be framed in the terms of capitalism. The builder-producer is cast as an individual entrepreneur prospering in the vast free market of the internet. No organization of labor into a collective seems possible, to counter the prevailing model of value extraction. In Ferro’s terms, the builder-producer remains acted “on” or “over” – this time by the platform. For builder-producers, power and profit is not shifted from the site to the architect, but instead from the site to the platform. The value extraction of the professional is not overcome, but replaced by the value extraction of the platform.
YouTube building explainers are seemingly offered as learning tools which can democratize construction and design. However, they change structures of financial and cultural capital – and professional expertise – rather than surmount them. Newer modes of production, labor and capital intersect here with older ones.
Acknowledgements
The first draft of this text was presented at the Production Studies International Conference, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, in March 2024. I’m grateful to Katie Lloyd Thomas, Silke Kapp, Will Thomson and Nick Beech among others for their helpful comments.
Notes
[1] Andrew Saint, Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
Citation
Adam Sharr, “Labor, Production, and Value in YouTube Building Explainers,” PLATFORM, November 4, 2024.
