Dan Olson (darts Player)

Folding Ideas is a YouTube channel created by Albertan documentarian Dan Olson (born June 1981 or 1982) 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.

Content

Olson published his first video in 2010, beginning as a pop culture YouTuber. He analyzed the way films, such as ''Triumph of the Will'' and ''Fight Club'', communicated certain moral values. 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. ''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. 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".

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".

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. Rouner compared the video to ''Q: Into the Storm'', calling Olson's video a "far more useful take".

Olson has also covered financial culture. 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.

Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs

''Line Goes Up'', Olson's most viewed work, criticized the utility of non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations, and cryptocurrency. The video went viral and was well received among critics of Web3.

References

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YouTubers from Alberta
Living people
Video essayists