YouTube Is Full of People Burning Things

The National Fire Prevention Association lists six different mot​ivations for arson: arson for revenge, for excitement, for vandalism, for profit, for crime concealment, and for political or religious extremism.

Short of crime concealment, each of the above can easily be found on YouTube; in particular the first two, which are also the most popular motives: revenge (41​ percent of arson crimes) and excitement (30 percent). YouTube is full of people burning things, and communities have sprung up around the most niche fiery pursuits, turning them into acts of exhibitionism.

The resulting videos are boring yet awesomely strange, for the very fact of their existence. Slow, purposeful cameras loom over smouldering shoes, swimwear, and dresses. In some, the camera frames a fireplace, where a disembodied hand gradually throws in items, but many of the videos have no people in them; only things. The goods destroyed almost always have inherent value, either in their designer branding or as fetishistic signifiers (jeans, women's shoes), or a personal significance hinted at in the description.

By the end they're gone. Something has been destroyed in these films, died, in a sense, on screen. They play like materialist mon​do movies.

"Dirty jeans, bu​rn!" is a 14-minute video recording a slow, drawn-out act of denim destruction. Soundtracked by the gentle hissing and crackling of flames, the video's creator, EP3467, zooms over the crotch and captures smoke emerging from the waistband. As with porn, there's a standard progression of narrative: the flames climb higher, the fire builds, then finally there's a pay-off, the ashy remainder of something now destroyed.

The clothes-burning videos rarely feature long captions or comments from their creators, giving them an eerie anonymous quality. But the destroyed clothes tell stories about their wearers: the tight jeans worn by Tom of Fin​land types, the formerly white shoes worn by scally boys.

Shoes feature prominently in burning videos, overlapping with the internet's  community of sneaker destruction fe​tishists. Search for any well-known brand along with "burning" and you'll find them: smouldering Adidas Neos, Pumas dispatched to Shoe Hades, Nike Air Max in a furnace, Air Yeezys singed in a back yard.

The videos catalogue acts of designer aggression, riffing on Rich Kids Of Instagram-style reckless materialism. What sets them apart is a willingness to confront their own material attachments by destroying their most valuable possessions on camera.

The burning videos can be unexpectedly soothing to watch–slow, meditative and predictable. But they reach their creepy zenith when they depict women's clothes being burned by what appear to be male hands. "Burn Wom​en's jeans" shows the jeans in question pinned on a washing line, as though the person shooting the video has intruded on somebody's garden. "Do not burn my ​clothes" is even eerier, showing the destruction of a flimsy pink nylon dress hung on a tree in a woodland setting, like something the Blair Witch would leave in her wake.

"Arson as revenge" accounts for most fire-related crimes, and this is reflected in YouTube videos like "Breaking Up ​is Hard to Do," which sees a wedding dress burned after a divorce, and "HOW TO GET OVER AN E​X? BURN THEY STUFF" where a jilted ex sings "in the flames bitch!" as he dances around a flaming bin.

On the other end of the spectrum there are the "Trash the Dress" brides, who burn their dresses in "alternative" wedding photographs and videos. In a sense they inadvertently play into somebody else's fetish: "Fairytale Bride Satin Shoes Burn" looks similar to a trash-the-dress clip, until you notice the hairy, distinctly male hand holding the lighter. It was uploaded by an account called Burning Dress, responsible for 147 videos that record the destruction of women's clothing, aided and abetted by a woman named Leni.

Regardless the motive, what most videos share is that the item burned must have value to merit destruction, usually to the person setting it alight. On the site isitnormal.com, where users crowdsource reassurance for their quirks, a user named flameboi sets out the criteria for his clothes burning fetish:

Some prefer cotton, others fur. Some prefer silk/satin for fireplay. IMO, the more beautiful the outfit chosen to be worn alight, the better.

Non-fetishistic version of the clothes burning video are even stranger, because the attachment to the item burning is wholly sincere, bordering on absurd. "Annbag burn up" captures a sartorial funeral, a family saying goodbye to an old bag while the violins from "Handbags and Gladrags" croon in the background.

Perhaps without intending to, the clothes burning fetish films of YouTube also serve as anti-capitalist statements. On a platform where the haul video holds sway, and where  beauty blog​gers are sponsored by international brand names, to burn a pair of Nikes is an act of anarchism. The mainstream fetishism bred by hauls and unboxing videos is mirrored back in destruction: material carnage solves the problem of what to do with all the stuff, after the haul video is over.

It's hard not to feel implicated watching these clips, as though by contributing to the view count we're becoming part of somebody's fetish. To get used to these videos might not be a good thing: the Macdonald Tri​ad (aka the triad of sociopathy) lists an obsession with fire setting as one of the qualities of a psychopath, along with bedwetting and cruelty to animals.

But then, perhaps the burning video niche has evolved to keep viewers from acting on their own Promethean impulses, allowing a swift and easy catharsis for those who would otherwise be themselves out torching underwear on washing lines.