For a few months, I have been collecting YouTube video comments

with 'Beirut explosion' as a keyword. Out of approximately 12

thousand results, more than half of the videos have no comments.
The other 5 thousand results contained up to 500 pages of
comments.
YouTube comments are a very specic territory on the internet. First,
the comments are a direct response to a specic video. A comment
made text, writing, for a video made mainly of moving images. The
opportunity to comment on videos appeals directly to the illusory struc-
ture of the current internet: content creation through networks and the
ability to interact with that content freely. Of course, this is not true.
Beyond common places with democratic potential on the internet, this
territory is currently controlled by strongly multiple conicting interests.
On one hand, anonymity on the Internet is no longer possible for most
users. Regardless of your using a pseudonym, the internet user can
be easily spotted by the security agencies; not by name but rather by
their online history. On the other hand, the requirements of identica-
tion and non-anonymity are often of coercive interests and control
those who hide under the mask of neoliberal citizenship; the user must
be readily identiable and classiable because the user is, primarily, a
citizen.
Here a commonplace: explosions in Beirut. As in Mexico but keeping
the big dierences, where violence generated by drug cartels has
become daily and cartels start using car bombs, in Beirut is likely to be
in a close situation or know someone who is. One interacts with the
event and at the same time there is an unbridgeable distance. But the
Lebanese people are also in this false dichotomy: so far and so close.
However, it is a real thing: people die. And I want to emphasize on this:
people die as a result of the explosions. The political phenomenon of
the explosions in Beirut is inhaprensible precisely because we can not
know its implications in the same explosion. The explosion is like a
bright light that can not be seen directly, but it maybe that to which
sheds light, or what, literally or metaphorically, is destroyed.
Comments on YouTube, is an overwhelming and banal demonstration
of the consequences of an explosion. It is a double distance away: is
not the explosion itself, not even the video of an explosion. Not a voice
testimony from someone who was there or who lost someone close in
the explosion. It is an amorphous and absurd amount of information
that is beset by many conicting ideologies from the absolute impossi-
bility of knowing the other. But paradoxically, this double distance can
reveal something about the explosion itself: possibly the center of
wickedness is not the explosion, but the unnamed ideology that cross-
es it. Death shares the same territory where internet connections
extend.
The political quality of a YouTube comment doesn't depends of the
'political' concepts in the text. It depends of the answers and replies
that can generate. This is for one reason: the public space on the
Internet is based on the interaction. And not only that all online content
will be seen by at least one person. It's something more: the interac-
tion is the essence of the internet. Content on internet searches essen-
tially generate visibility. The possibility of political content on the
Internet is, like it or not, visibility. And this is where the conict arises
because both consensus and dissent seek visibility. The dierence,
here or in internet, can be violent.
Thus, the isolate YouTube comment, separate from its source of origin,
loses its signicant and becomes ambiguous. Decontextualized, is not
anymore a response to the video. YouTube comment, thought as mate-
rial body of text, is powerful precisely because it loses its purely instru-
mental character.

A Micro History of YouTube in Beirut.
A Micro History of YouTube in Beirut is an ongoing project by Miguel Fernndez de Castro with the support of Ashkal Alwan-The Lebanese Association of Plastic Arts, in the
context of Home Workspace Program 2013-2014.
During 3 days, 6 hours per day, a reading of the entire book was made with the support of volunteers.