I’m Losing My YouTube Channel.

[Looking for where to find me instead? <my website (you’re here)>, <my Patreon (please join for free!!!)>, and <my mailing list (~4 emails a year)>]

Some of y’all might remember that a few years ago, I legally changed my name, which was a whole minefield. Even though the legal process itself was relatively smooth, it took years to get (enough) of my documents, diplomas, and other accounts reconciled to reliably be able to function in any administrative capacity. At the same time, I updated my handles, changed my website’s URL, and, of course, got a new email address to match my new name. I started porting over YouTube videos (and uploading new ones) to my new channel, because having a video presence online is important to me.

From the beginning, this account has been strictly professional. Along with uploads when I have the time and energy, I use it mainly to watch livestream performances of my work so I can applaud performers I’d otherwise never get to meet in person. I leave comments thanking people for doing such a great job with my music. Often, these are incredibly special experiences for me.

But today, that five-year-old YouTube account had a banner at the top stating that as a kid’s account, I need to join my parents’ Family Center to keep access to my channel. (Because one of my other accounts included an option to correct my region, I sped through some screens looking for it, and as such I seem to have botched whatever option was available to me should I have consented to giving my parents, who are entirely too old to have a kindergartener, access to and parental controls over my account.)

There is no “local law” anywhere near where I live, work, or go home to visit family. And my accounts on the whole are not new. Even my five-year-old email is linked to a much older account, which predates my adulthood by quite some time. (It’s also flagged, by the way.)

And let’s be clear: age verification and its related efforts are an insidious scam. Parental controls have existed since TIME IMMEMORIAL, at least for those of us on the Millennial/Gen Z cusp and our younger counterparts. The current push across the globe for age verification and facial recognition is part of an expansion of the surveillance state, and if that’s news to you, I highly recommend you do some digging (404 Media is a really great starting point). This is the modern era’s attempt at making us all walk on eggshells because our every move is being watched, and thanks to Big Tech companies taking this shit online, our browsing habits, purchase histories, and Watch Later lists aren’t safe.

It’s a fear tactic as well as a censorship technique—because hey, if your account is a kid’s account, there’s a bunch of stuff YouTube can unilaterally decide you can’t watch! That list can arbitrarily (or statutorily) expand at any time! And you can sure bet that at some point some state is going to pass a law that says that list should include queer folks, people of the global majority, creators who think you should have rights, and plenty of other folks the government doesn’t like!

Frankly, if these platforms actually cared about their users, they should be fighting against age verification in every jurisdiction, not rushing to implement it and botching it so badly that users in states with no such statutory requirements are affected. That would be the responsible thing to do. But in this capitalist hellscape, we are nothing more than collections of data that make them money, and they stand to financially benefit from being able to link our massive data footprints to drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers. Their goal is to functionally end anonymity on the internet, because it is more profitable for them to sell data to the highest bidder than to actually defend the principles the internet was founded on.

I might do a deep dive on current censorship efforts (including the attempts to repeal Section 230 and other challenges to the First Amendment) at some point in the future, but right now, I’m just pissed. All of this is particularly grating as I am not only a grown-ass adult, I am a child of Silicon Valley. My parents drilled into me from an early age that if an online service like social media was free, the user was the product. What I didn’t understand at the time was how that data—or, in this case, the purported lack thereof—could be used against me. Because even though my multiple Gmail accounts have been connected together for my new address’ entire life, even though I have other accounts in that pile that are in themselves almost old enough to vote, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is claiming that my new account can’t possibly be an adult’s account because it’s only five years old. And they are going to take away the entirety of my creative output on their platform because I won’t capitulate to their demands.

Some of you are probably looking on in bemusement, wondering why this is the hill my online video presence withers on. I invite you to consider that I’ve spent years advocating for composers and other creatives to be able to choose their own privacy settings in a music world that rushed to tokenize us for our identities and is now hanging us out to dry because a few specific governments want to criminalize us for those very same traits. Even so, being forced off the most popular video platform in the world will have real, tangible impacts on my career. Hosting videos and embedding them on my website will be harder. When I reupload them to my Patreon (they will be available to free subscribers, I promise), I will have to redo the captioning and audio description I spent hours painstakingly doing directly in YouTube’s interface. I will lose the >1,000 views on Ashley’s wonderful recording of go to the garden and the hundreds of views on my ICD privacy practices video. I’ll also lose the playlists I’ve carefully curated of so many of your performances of my work, which I have shared on my website in various areas to help performers find reference recordings. My SEO will probably suffer, making it harder for performers to efficiently find my works and those recordings. (And on my personal account with my actual YouTube history, I’ll lose access to creators I’ve long followed, whose content probably won’t be available to me anymore due to existing suppression efforts by YouTube.)

The only things cutting through my grief right now are: one, I saw this coming, so I am already in the process of ramping up my Patreon to store my creative output. My archive of essays is already in the process of re-posting over there, and after those are all scheduled, I’ll start working on the videos in earnest. All the videos I’d normally make available on my YouTube channel and other public accounts will be available to free subscribers—after all, I want my work to remain as easy to find as possible.

And two, although I do regret feeding Meta and Google so much data in my teenage years and early adulthood, I don’t blame myself for spending my formative years trying to use the internet to build a community. After all, it’s brought me all of you!

I have no plans to go anywhere, though things certainly feel dire right now. I do plan to spend the rest of this year (and probably years to come) separating myself from Google as completely as I can, along with some other major conglomerates. Currently, I plan to remain on social media (though my Twitter has been dead for years), because that’s where most of y’all are. But for more consistent updates on my work and cool musical things, I’m going to be focusing on three places: my website (here), my Patreon (which you can and absolutely should join for free!!!), and my mailing list (which gets roughly four emails a year—I promise, I don’t spam you). If you want to know where to find me in the future, I’ll try to keep my Contact page updated with where I’m open to artistic connections, but right now, these three platforms are where I’m putting my effort. If you don’t mind an email or two every once in awhile, I’d love it if you’d join me.

And in the messy interim, while I process the loss of a platform I worked hard to build into something I was proud of, please bear with me. It is going to take a monumental amount of time and labor to rebuild on other platforms, and I am grieving even as I look to the digital future and see still more storm clouds ahead.

Oh, and, trans friends who have done the name change thing? Make sure your videos are backed up somewhere.

Thanks for reading! If you learned something from this post and would like to tip me, head on over to my Ko-fi page. For more analysis and commentary like this in your life, check back again soon, and consider subscribing to my mailing list (at the bottom of the page) for quarterly update emails on my biggest projects. To support the long-term work I do as an artist and advocate, you can find me on Patreon and @honestlyeris on Instagram.