Politics in the Age of YouTube: Degraded Images and Small Screen Revolutions S.V. Srinivas [Published in Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds. Asian video cultures: in the penumbra of the global. Duke University Press, 2017.] YouTube is for the most part a site of consumption where users are likely to either re-post what they find interesting or produce remixes that Lawrence Lessig usefully designates as crap: “The vast majority of remix, like the vast majority of home movies, or consumer photographs, or singing in the shower, or blogs, is just crap. Most of these products are silly or derivative, a waste of even the creator’s time, let alone the consumer’s.” 1 Lessig goes on to argue that the issue is not the poor aesthetic/intellectual quality of the product but the opportunities it provides to users to acquire the competencies to use the medium. It would be a pointlessly rhetorical to ask if the crap on YouTube has analytical and political significance. I would like to steer clear of assertions of transformative possibilities of media consumption and the capacity of “popular culture metaphors and analogies to refresh political rhetoric,” 2 and stay with more mundane fact of life in our times: the media consumption is now a necessary condition for political mobilizations. These need not always be either refreshed or significantly transformed by the deployment of popular cultural resources. So what then might the study of media forms and their consumption tell us about modes of political participation? My case study is the mobilization centred on the moderate demand for the formation of the Telangana state within India. This was no uprising against a dictatorship or the first baby step towards a democratic government. The duration and scale however was impressive even by Indian standards. For a variety of reasons that I will not go into here, the agitation lasted well over a decade (from roughly 2001-2014) and frequently involved tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of agitators. The mobilization coincided with large scale digitization of “content” and rapidly increasing levels of access to the internet in India. Most importantly, it was accompanied by a spurt in online activity that was for the most part generative of a lot of crap.