Banalization as Mediation: Youtuber Franchino and His Hateful Vernacularity

The chapter aims to assess the dynamic interaction of YouTube's political economy-driven platform and the (gradually) politicized rhetoric of an Italian influencer, Franchino er Criminale. YouTube makes strong claims how one is supposed to use the platform, to make videos and finally to be neoliberally successful. This platform provides tools to minimize the initial investment as well as the required low know-how about producing attractive videos. It’s a labor process where the facilitation of the worker’s process of acquiring skills is almost directly proportional to the capability of the platform to extract value from it. Franchino is a peculiar food reviewer who uses digital platforms in order to perform his food politics. Our study is based on the qualitative analysis of all videos uploaded to the Franchino er Criminale YouTube channel between late 2021 and early 2023. The results show how the rhetoric of this influencer’s speech pushes back against a glamorized pornification of food in order to re-assert a more humble, traditional, and community-based food production and consumption. The mediation of the digital platform becomes properly political to the degree in which Franchino and Youtube's economic interests align. In other words, increased audience as increased audience labor time sold to the advertising companies. In the process of seeking to increase his viewership and followers within YouTube 's affordances, we make sense of the ambivalent trajectory of Franchino’s stance through the notion of “passiverevolution”, i.e. the tension between social continuity and change: paradoxically enough, moving from local vernacularity towards a national-populist direction, while his discourse gradually becomes more politicized, its transformative potential gets gradually defused.