Folding Ideas
Dan Olson | |
|---|---|
 Olson in 2013 | |
| Born | June 1981 or 1982 |
| Education | Southern Alberta Institute of Technology[2] |
| Years active | 2010–present |
| YouTube information | |
| Channel | |
| Genres | Video essay, Documentary |
| Subscribers | 1.0 million |
| Views | 114 million |
| Last updated: April 29, 2025 | |
Folding Ideas is a YouTube channel created by Canadian documentarian Dan Olson (born June 1981 or 1982)[3][1] which covers topics including media criticism, conspiracies, and financial culture. Olson's work has been received positively by critics, with Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs as a noted work. Scholar Christina Wurst labeled Folding Ideas a part of LeftTube.[4]: 216
Content
[edit]Olson published his first video in 2010, beginning as a pop culture YouTuber.[1][5] He analyzed the way films, such as Triumph of the Will and Fight Club, communicated certain moral values.[6]: 219 [7]: 125 In the videos "Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor" and "The Thermian Argument", Olson criticized tendencies to focus on the literal elements of a creative work to the detriment of less literal elements like metaphor.[8] Vox writer Emily St. James and Polygon writer Ben Kuchera praised "Folding Ideas - #GamerGate", a video where Olson analyzed the motives of the Gamergate movement.[9][10] In 2018, Olson published a three-part series analyzing Fifty Shades franchise, where Olson argued that the films promoted unsafe kink practices and dynamics. Polygon writer Wil Williams included it in their list of the "best of the best" video essays, calling it "refreshingly kink-positive" and praising its analysis of the first film as "shockingly fair".[11]
Fellow YouTubers Doug Walker and James Rolfe were also the subjects of Folding Ideas videos. In his video reviewing Rolfe's work, Olson also reflected on his own position relative to Rolfe and why he felt the need to review Rolfe's work. Reviewer Jack Benjamin called its commentary "empathetic and insightful" and "exemplary to critics on YouTube and beyond".[12]
In 2020, Olson published "In Search of a Flat Earth", where he performs an experiment at Lake Minnewanka showing the Earth's curvature before pivoting into the origins of flat Earth theories, linking them to QAnon-style conspiracies. Williams and Jef Rouner of Datebook noted the video's shots of the Canadian landscape as beautiful.[13][14] Rouner compared the video to Q: Into the Storm, calling Olson's video a "far more useful take".[14]
Olson has also covered financial culture.[5] In 2022, Olson investigated Publishing.com, which provides a course that purportedly allows its students to earn passive income through the use of a ghostwriter. Olson argued that the books produced through this process had poor factual accuracy and gave the ghostwriters extremely low pay.[15][16]
Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs
[edit]
Line Goes Up, Olson's most viewed work, criticized the utility of non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations, and cryptocurrency.[12][17][18] The video was published to his YouTube channel on January 21, 2022.[19]
Olson traces the early history of Web3 through the 2008 Great Recession and the creation and early history of Bitcoin and Ethereum before reviewing concepts, technologies, and economics of cryptocurrency. Olson then goes over the history and technologies behind NFTs while arguing that they mainly exist to get more people into the cryptocurrency industry.[20] Olson then spends the next segment of the video criticizing the current general lack of quality in NFT art and NFT art collections. In the later half of the video Olson goes over the Crypto and NFT community while also going over and criticizing blockchain games, the "play to earn" gaming business model (focusing on Axie Infinity in particular), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). He concludes the video arguing that the core of the upcoming Web3 movement is a "turf war" between the top 5% and 1% and the market is based on the pitch of 'buy in now and you can be the next tech millionaire', calling it similar to pitches from multi-level marketing companies. He expresses a stance that, no matter how bad the current system is, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains are the beginning of a worse system intent on making everything have a speculative price.
In an interview with Vice, Olson stated he followed the rise of Bitcoin hearing claims that it would reach mass adoption, though after using it, he believed that cryptocurrency was not functional and that it is only viable because its price kept on increasing over time. Olson later came to believe that the history of cryptocurrency was a story about the evolution of fraud. He later became skeptical of new developments in crypto technology viewing them as overpromising and this drove feelings of frustration and anger which led to him making the video. Olson stated he started writing the video in April 2021, only to shelve it until the fall of 2021 because of rapid developments during this period, which made his written material quickly obsolete. The video was released in January 2022.[21]
Release and reception
[edit]As of June 2024[update], the documentary had 14.8 million views with 428 thousand likes.[19] After the video essay's release it trended on Twitter[21] and several media outlets such as NPR and The Verge interviewed Olson for his expertise on NFTs and cryptocurrency.[22][20] The Verge's Casey Newton noted "few of Olson's criticisms are entirely new, though the collective force of Olson's arguments is substantial."[20] The New York Times calls it "a two-hour exegesis on the flaws with NFTs and crypto."[23]
Two critics highlighted it in the 2022 Sight and Sound video essay poll. José Sarmiento said it was the best video essay of the year; Jason Mittell reviewed that it was prescient, comprehensive and "utterly captivating and convincing" but questioned whether its length was necessary.[24] The following year, Olson's essay on a related topic—"The Future is a Dead Mall"—was nominated in the poll.[25]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Levinson, Eliza (2022-02-11). "Meet the Guy Who Went Viral for Explaining How NFTs Are a 'Poverty Trap'". VICE. Retrieved 2025-05-08.
- ^ "Dan Olson". Luma Quarterly. Retrieved 2025-05-05.
- ^ Olson, Dan (June 25, 2024). "Finished one of my most ambitious videos ever, finally saw Los Campesinos! in concert (on my birthday no less), already off to a great start on the next project, I've got Shadow of the Erdtree and Oxygen Not Included expansions to play, and a kitty is snoring in my lap. Been a pretty good week". Bluesky. Retrieved May 3, 2025.
- ^ Wurst, Christina (November 29, 2022). "Bread and Plots: Conspiracy Theories and the Rhetorical Style of Political Influencer Communities on YouTube" (PDF). Media and Communication. 10 (4): 213–223. doi:10.17645/mac.v10i4.5807.
- ^ a b Schindel, Dan (2024-01-23). "Video Essays to Beat the January Blues". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2025-04-29.
- ^ Plantinga, Carl (2023). Screen Stories and Moral Understanding: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-766566-4.
- ^ Hanich, Julian; Rossouw, Martin P. (2023-09-05). What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship. Univ of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-38680-8.
- ^ McCrea, Aisling (2021-02-24). "Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos". Current Affairs. ISSN 2471-2647. Retrieved 2025-04-29.
- ^ Kuchera, Ben (2014-12-30). "The year of GamerGate: The worst of gaming culture gets a movement". Polygon. Retrieved 2025-05-08.
- ^ James, Emily St (2014-10-21). "Here's a terrific video about the roots of #GamerGate". Vox. Retrieved 2025-05-08.
- ^ Williams, Wil (2021-06-01). "The essential video essays of YouTube history". Polygon. Retrieved 2025-05-07.
- ^ a b Benjamin, Jack (2024-06-21). "I don't know Dan Olson: Folding Ideas and the introspection of cultural critique". Indy Film Library. Retrieved 2025-04-29.
- ^ Williams, Wil (2020-12-30). "The best video essays of 2020". Polygon. Retrieved 2025-04-29.
- ^ a b Rouner, Jef (April 9, 2021). "Five films that dig into conspiracy theories". Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide. Retrieved 2025-04-29.
- ^ Grady, Constance (2024-04-16). "Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here's how they get made". Vox. Retrieved 2025-05-06.
- ^ Coletti, Andrew (2023-09-07). "Would You Trust AI to Help You Forage?". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 2025-05-06.
- ^ Chow, Andrew R. (2022-02-03). "'The Problem With NFTs': A Crypto Expert Responds to a Viral Takedown". TIME. Retrieved 2025-05-06.
- ^ Gilbert, Ben. "A viral YouTube takedown of NFTs has already clocked over 5 million views: Here are the biggest revelations". Business Insider. Retrieved 2025-05-06.
- ^ a b Olson, Dan (January 21, 2022). Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs (Video). Retrieved February 14, 2022.
- ^ a b c Newton, Casey (January 28, 2022). "Three things Web3 should fix in 2022". The Verge. Retrieved February 2, 2022.
- ^ a b Levinson, Eliza (February 11, 2022). "Meet the Guy Who Went Viral for Explaining How NFTs Are a Bullshit 'Poverty Trap'". Vice. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
- ^ Martin, Michel (February 13, 2022). "Cryptocurrency expert slams NFT hype". NPR. Retrieved May 28, 2022.
- ^ Roose, Kevin (March 18, 2022). "What are NFTs?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved October 2, 2022.
- ^ Lee, Grace; Trocan, Irina; Harris, Cydnii Wilde (January 13, 2023). "The best video essays of 2022". Sight and Sound. British Film Institute. Retrieved December 31, 2023.
- ^ Meadows, Queline; Trocan, Irina; Webb, Will (December 19, 2023). "The best video essays of 2023". Sight and Sound. British Film Institute. Retrieved December 31, 2023.