Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos

every book of the bible was written by me time traveling across history and adopting different personas to influence the course of humanity i did it for fun street lamps have bombs on them i love getting requests from my audience as though you people know what you want anybody begging me to analyze the new bo burnham special what do you want me to say kovid make man sad am i an imdb page to you [ __ ] i look like a zoltar machine put a dollar in my mouth i'll spit it back at the moon at the speed of light that's where the craters come from this mouth houses hot takes only if i start flippantly regurgitating common consensus on popular properties i'll be like only you i don't want to be like you go watch whoever used to be your favorite video essayist before i kicked in the door this [ __ ] 100 thou in six months not enough at one million i make miraculous genius and here's why don't bother asking for it sooner i don't take requests my ambition is much bigger than youtube but i'll happily conquer it along the way i like bo burnham as much as the next guy but the medium of musical comedy inherently irks me putting a few jokes in your song doesn't make me suddenly enjoy listening to bad music it's stand-up comedy diluted in an ocean of amateur musicality like drinking flat warm watery 7up out of a mug kind of music kind of comedy cutting edge the worst of both worlds and they're never satisfied with just writing a funny song are they they're always like and now i'm going to make a point i can hear your defense of the medium already cj you're only listening to the bad stuff what about tim mentioned and tenacious d well they [ __ ] suck too the axis of awesome four chord song has single-handedly fueled so much pompous reductive stupidity they should be tried for war crimes musical snl monologues aren't funny why are we doing them so the fact that despite this proclivity of mine i yet vibe with bo burnham's work to the extent that i do should demonstrate my admiration for his artistry particularly his penchant for stretching the medium of comedy ultra rehearsed theatrics dense hyperactivity it feels like home for me pages are blank i know it why am i lying to you and i do love stand-up comedy is one of the purest ways to circumvent self-consciousness my affinity for offensive comedy is rooted in its ability to reach into you and yank out authenticity in the form of laughter before you get a chance to make a judgment or decide how you're going to react not once not ever ever saw my dad hit my mother i mean he was quick and you can i don't get to decide if i laughed at that it happened my brain said absolutely not that is a big no-no you're cancelled but my emotions said that's kind of funny it shocks you into being you and not the person watching themselves watching something burnham's work excels in inducing the state of shock and authenticity me with my strange choice of adjectives you with your muscular teeth and clockwise vagina his specials are truly the control old delete of stand-up what do you think industrial piping close stay out of it his violent attack on boredom is relentless [Music] i've been looking for you for quite a long time and of course there's the much fond over forays into meaningful self-expression i just hope i don't get more from this than you do these patented bo burnham mix appoint moments are always basically like performing and being perceived in the digital age is complicated and i'm like yeah we think we know yeah yeah it is no yeah i got it if it feels like i'm praising burnham's artistry with a tone that reveals a hint of resentment for it and the discourse surrounding it it's because that's what i'm doing i'd say it to his face and he'd agree with me to summarize the show though me me me i'd also say this to his face it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when white people who aren't invested in hip-hop culture say stuff like this hip-hop artist for me and it is for me hip-hop you can't just be a self-aware [ __ ] you have to actually stop being an [ __ ] traded in words and poetry for beat fetishism it's where you make a sick beat and then you wrap anything over it and people lose their minds and it doesn't help when it's preceding a parody rap song that mocks the culture [Music] especially when the finale of the very show wherein you do that joke is simply a recreation of a kanye west performance concept and then other people who don't give a [ __ ] about hip-hop praise you for being a genius because you did hip-hop but white and relatable it offends me but i don't have any interest in bludgeoning people for the problematic pixels in the 4k screen that is their life because if i did i choked to death on the hypocrisy 2021's inside is vernon's fourth comedy special he made it alone in one room during the pandemic whoa how creative it's in direct conversation with his 2016 special make happy which concluded with a stark admission that performing live was damaging his mental health in make happy he monologues about how the performer audience divide and society is collapsing and he's like really sad and stuff i know very little about anything but what i do know is that if you can live your life without an audience you should do it make happy a demand and a mandate he showed up created the show made us happy then he quit stand up to make him handle happy right now it's very literal i cannot handle performing in front of you people it gives me panic attacks i want to stop and i did yeah you know i mean in the following years he directed an extremely a24 movie and did some acting roles his mental health improved over the years so in 2020 he decided to get back into performing and that decision nigh immediately resulted in a decline in his mental health yet again he essentially did that thing where you go on mood stabilizing medication and then your life slowly starts to smooth out and then you're like i kind of got the [ __ ] locked down i don't know if i need the meds and then you quit them and then promptly empty your bank account [ __ ] your ex do drugs and hurt all your friends feelings and you're like right right right okay right right anyways the end product we're all gawking over is inside which is great and i liked it and everyone liked it and stuff in the rare case you haven't already perused within its macabre margins inside is a comedy special art house film that's 30 jokes 30 music 40 depression and 100 reason to remember the name the music in it is the best out of all the specials by an extremely wide margin it's actually just good music [Music] the unholy dark moments of existential pain are hilarious to me so i'm just gonna sit here and enjoy uh my twenties and then get back to work the futurism despair and the documentation of the spiraling mental health throat quarantine comes through loud and clear even if it'll be really irritating to watch people wax philosophical on twitter about how meaningful it all is for the next six months what am i doing what why am i tone policing people who love art i love art we're on the same side hot take inside is good why am i being such a [ __ ] about this thank you for your enduring honesty bo burnham you killing yourself slowly for our entertainment has been so fun for us now i'm going to talk about the 58 second song about jeff bezos and nothing else [Music] part one hysterical and concept alone the op of an anime where the protagonist is inexplicably jeff bezos a girl power bop for lex luthor an inspirational anthem for jeff on his quest for success just in case bezos was feeling a little unmotivated today people are always criticizing the poor guy let's send him some good vibes the implications contained in the mere conception of this song are overwhelmingly comedically rich as a virus tears through the planet and bezos's net worth concurrently soars through the hundreds of billions 95 of humanity buckling under the financial strain of universal lockdowns and governments vetoing livable stimulus checks the digital age reaching what feels like terminal velocity and bo burnham has one salient thought jeff bezos needs a song to commemorate his success unenergy arises from the inscrutable intentions in the best 1975 song love it if we made it there are four lines about that donald guy the um the uh that guy that failed in the business world so many times that he had to pivot his entire career [Applause] [Music] although one could readily guess the political leanings of matt healy by looking at him for a sec these four lines do not carry an explicit political message in fact they carry no message at all they're inarguable just factual statements they're quotes no judgment is passed the power of these lines is that we aren't told what to feel he just put reality on a pedestal and pointed at it the rest of the meaning is our responsibility if matt healy singing i moved on her like a [ __ ] feels like a criticism of your favorite failed businessman it's because your bankrupt 70 year old baby with the skin of a car seat is a walking criticism of himself the truth was so apparent it didn't require editorializing if reality is offensive to you reality is the offensive part not the person acknowledging reality and don't take that out of context to be a turf instead of critiquing jeff bezos in the system that created him burnham states facts and needlessly lends a word of encouragement to the most powerful human being on the planet his motivational pep talk rings absolutely insane and unnecessary but theoretically for a supporter of bezos it should ring sincere and inspirational he sidesteps direct commentary and instead simply describes the momentum of bezos's trajectory which is ostensibly the american dream what we're left with is an uneditorialized representation of reality and the feeling it ignites within us is our own reaction to the truth do we want bezos to keep conquering does he need us to be more supportive and in awe of his monopolization of the global economy is his work ethic and ambition truly inspirational is this what you people who defend billionaires want us to do write anthems for our overlords [ __ ] it you can do it bezos burn it all part two lyrical analysis really weird you guys were just listening to me talk about anything that's just what the vibe is the song opens with a mantra a greek chorus chanting the inevitability of the hero's fate it's like the overture of hadestown or hamilton or hercules or other musicals that start with [Music] born h 1964 jeffrey jeffrey who jeffrey spitting straight facts it's all available on bezos's wikipedia page by its partisan inescapable truth bezos is a ceo he is an entrepreneur he was born in 1964. his name is jeffrey jeffrey bezos the simple stating of these unbelievably fundamental facts is so [ __ ] ominous the mantra repeats and a second voice joins in harmony it bears repeating 1964 jeffrey bezos explaining such googlable information is so redundant that it practically begs to be understood beneath the surface this isn't informative it's chilling prophecy what the [ __ ] is ceo entrepreneur born in 1964 jeffrey bezos gonna do we've established the origins of our mythic protagonist we now must encourage him towards his destiny come on jeffrey you can do it pave the way put your back into it bezos doesn't need a better work ethic the only thing this man ever talks about are productivity optimization and ingenuity he's a business oriented self-help book that a wizard made a real boy come on jeffrey you can do it he knows he can do it perchance slightly too well the following lines transition us from a place of encouragement to a place of requesting mentorship and pledging allegiance it positions humanity as students of bezos the man who won capitalism pave the way put your back into it tell us why jeff bezos is not a criminal he operates within the law he's created millions of jobs and he's made all of our lives more convenient his entire philosophy is giving people what they want and making our lives better amazon ideologically is obsessed with customer worship and they will tell you that culture of customer obsession obsessive focus on customers obsesses over our customers totally obsessing over the customer experience customer obsession was our north star this technique and guiding principle that bezos clings to slavishly is devastatingly effective and it's crushingly effective across the board in all sectors of commerce if bezos even mentions there's an area that he's interested in investing in all of the competition in that field find their stock value plummeting because it is assumed that bezos is going to destroy them it doesn't matter what it is he's done it before he'll do it again what is this chest tightening sensation that comes with this knowledge what's wrong with bezos being more powerful and successful than literally everybody else what's wrong with someone winning capitalism in some respects i agree staunchly with bezos's business principles he rejects the standard stock market quarterly profit obsession in favor of commitment to quality and long-term ingenuity when the stock is up 30 percent in a month don't feel 30 percent smarter because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month it's not going to feel so good to feel 30 dumber never spend any time thinking about the daily stock price i don't okay i like that i hate the fake numbers and the global gambling game of stonks i hate the analytics that youtube and spotify are constantly shoving down your throat against your will telling all this [ __ ] like your percentage of growth today was lower than it was yesterday it doesn't [ __ ] matter my business and my artistry is not an algorithmic game i'm playing with people's minds my business is a good idea and good execution performing a service that people desire when you start focusing entirely on quarterly profit increase and benefiting your shareholders moment to moment it necessarily makes you focus on minutia instead of ensuring integrity of the big picture of your operation admits natural fluctuations in the economy i'm not gonna argue with that it's right and it's what bezos is doing so what's wrong seeing someone win at capitalism is [ __ ] because it leaves us asking is capitalism the game we're supposed to be playing we're born into this nightmare where profit delineates value our consent and this value judgment is manufactured and assumed but we did make it and we're all sticking to it humanity set the parameters for success then we got our ubermensch here he is thanks i hate it look at where you came from look at you now when dunking on billionaires and other successful people a default fault that's easy to levy against them is that they didn't earn their success how i became a homeowner in my 20s cut back on sushi i only eat it six days a week my father the inventor of blood wired me seven million dollars like that donald man who looks precisely like i would draw a woodland troll with embarrassingly weak magical abilities he likes to strut himself around like he made something of himself and he's talented in some capacity but in actuality he built his life off of a loan of a million dollars which he then lost because he's bad at business but bezos was not born into wealth his parents were broke and children his dad was 19 and his mom was 17 but his 17 year old mom was a [ __ ] hustler she had to fight for her right to stay in high school when she got pregnant because it was the 60s and she won that fight and then she graduated with a baby then she did night school while raising jeff needless to say these were challenging conditions to overcome but as a child jeff started modding electrical appliances around his home of his own volition he graduated high school was valedictorian he graduated university with a 4.2 gpa then he started working in telecommunications then he moved on to banking then he joined a hedge fund then he started amazon then he bought everything and next he's gonna [ __ ] off the space and buy everything there too he did that thing we're supposed to do work your way up and he did it better than anybody has ever done it so naturally now he controls everything he deserves to doesn't he he did it best the problem here isn't bezos it's the system our manufactured consent to this value judgment jeffrey is making clear what was veiled he's showing us how to win at this game that we made are we playing the right game bezos is demonstrably richer than bill gates warren buffett and mark zuckerberg but the deeper more philosophical distinguishing factor that sets bezos apart from those three is that he's bald i'm kidding that's not it bezos once penned a memo to his shareholders codifying 24 rules of corporate coolness in it he lists things that are and are not cool young is cool polite is cool authenticity is cool the unexpected is cool rudeness is not cool pandering to the crowd is not cool conquerors are not cool what colon is this why did bezos feel the need to write these words why is this information inside his brain why do you think it was pertinent to share with shareholders the answer to this question is exceedingly important this is the most powerful [ __ ] ball dude that exists as bezos puts it in the memo if corporations are cool customers invite them into their private spaces and that's exactly where bezos is in all of our homes he's listening and tailoring our experience to the finest point of our desires and i think jeff really embraced that that idea that hey if you have data ultimately you win and you out here just doing your best to start a business amateurs can [ __ ] suck it [ __ ] their wives drink their blood come on jeff get him i don't think most people fully understand what amazon is it began as an online bookstore in 1994. that's before i was born that's before 9 11. that's before the internet as we know it bezos clocked the dormant energy in the internet while everyone else was still skeptical of it his business plan for amazon was extremely specific open a bookshop online relied from the constraints of physical reality your online store can have a wider selection than any in-person store could ever hold commit to running the business at a loss for years pricing your books lower than all other stores the combination of the price superior range of selection and convenience of being able to purchase from your home and have it delivered to your doorstep will eventually make you the only logical choice as a book retailer so of course amazon slowly grew to cover the entire country and of course it started to slowly destroy the book retailer business because no one could compete but bezos is a businessman he doesn't want to just see businesses fail left and right he has empathy so we approach the other retailers with a solution keep your store keep all of your sales and sell online we already built the infrastructure just give us a tiny cut and you can gain access to this new audience that we're addressing your business still exists like normal and you gain access to the online sphere that we've created we take a little bit of a cut from every time you sell a book but you're selling books to the new premier customer base for books instead of killing off his competition he's bringing them with him and the other retailers conceded my backer's so bad god damn it they started selling their books through amazon and through amazon they made more money more profits sold more units than they had in years our attitude toward amazon was you know render under caesar and that which is caesars and then carry on as best you can as amazon's delivery system grew more and more sophisticated bazel started selling hundreds of other products in addition to books and he approached every other retailer in the country with the same proposition use our system sell online in the biggest online marketplace there is in existence but do you understand what's happening amazon isn't just selling its own products is taxing any product that gains to be sold online and there's no [ __ ] point in creating an alternative method to sell things online because bezos already did it perfectly he's already dominating why would you invest the money to try to compete with it when inevitably they're just going to defeat you and you'll have lost at all there's no point just start a different business and sell your [ __ ] partially through amazon for those of you that believe a free market is the best way to ensure people work hard and get what they deserve it's not a free market if a dude owns the market amazon has created jobs made our lives more convenient made a lot of people money saved a lot of people money now with prime video they're financing films they made audible so you can hear books and they made the kindle in case you still remember how to read them they own twitch so by extension the entire streaming industry they're breaking into the prescription drug industry they bought whole foods so they can revolutionize grocery shopping next and of course in all of amazon services they're recording every second that you're interacting with their software so they can use that data to optimize the usefulness of their product for you they're extracting data from every moment of your relationship with every single product that they create and they're using that data to make your experience the best it could possibly be and the only thing they ask for in return is their unquestioned dominance over all commerce ah part three the solo i transcribed the song look i did the whole thing it was easy yeah that's musescore not sibelius maybe i'm a broke [ __ ] maybe open source software is the best way to advance humanity and technology in an altruistic collaborative fashion maybe i'll kill your firstborn with a wrench i'll stab you with a gun i'll shoot you with a sword i'll kill you with a gun that shoots swords the harmony of bo burnham's one minute song titled bezos 1 is uncomplicated alternating e minor and d major triads add color to a furious bass line of even 16th notes the aesthetic is that of a gay nightclub in the 80s it sounds like tears for fears and it makes me want to do cocaine there's a classic adage in music theater when movement isn't enough you dance when speaking isn't enough you sing after setting the stage of bezos's life and then encouraging bezos and learning from bezos and cheering bezos on eventually burnham becomes overwhelmed by the momentum of bezos's destiny and then he lets out a battle cry in celebration of his conquering of everything come on jeff get him this battle cry unlocks a blistering synth solo when singing is not enough you scream and when screaming is not enough you rip a fat lick the solo consists primarily of one motif repeated ad nauseum the motif goes four flat five four three one in the key of e minor so a b flat a g e that b flat at the top is deciding a lot about the tone of the solo in the key of e minor b-flat is not necessitated by the key signature it's a decision the effect of which is immediately apparent as b-flat is the blue note of g which is the relative major of e minor so it functions similarly in both cases [Music] that's the blue note don't be intimidated by music theory is just names for noises you already know burnham hammers this repetitive bluesy motif into us again and again and again again it's another stylistic property of the blues to really sit in a lick for a while the blues is said to speak to the human soul like little else does it's an expression that came out of working-class sentiment and sorrow and spoke leaning into those sensations so the emotion derived from this blues lick that burnham is leaning so heavily into is that it's something in his heart that really needs to get out vernon repeats the motif identically three times in a row and then finally he departs from that to play an f sharp altered scale [Music] the altered scale also known as super locrian is the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale and is a famously uncomfortable and unstable sound every note is technically fair game within the key but it still feels very disconcerting to listen to this dissonant scale in combination with the childish rhythm it's played in really inspires a sense of unease but it only rears its head for a second and then burnham is back in his blues motif it loops as though it will never end it starts to rush ahead of itself and fall apart and then we get one beat of bo screaming and that's the end of the song [Music] i don't know about you guys it all comes across so desperate like the solo is dragging burnham behind a chain to offender it's inevitable it's basking in its own glory it's repeating and it's compressing and it's speeding up and it won't stop and bow is dragged along with it whether or not he likes then he screams because he doesn't know what else to do it makes me laugh every time part four what's bothering bo in anticipation of writing about this song to refresh myself on the context from once it was born i watched everything that bo burnham's ever created four times burnham has filmed four full hour comedy specials produced the tv show and directed a feature film his career started when he achieved virality accidentally at the age of 16 with bad musical comedy he managed to leverage the online attention into a real-life stand-up career and was the youngest person to ever obtain obtain obtain he managed to leverage the online attention into real life success starting in stand-up and becoming the youngest person to ever secure a 30-minute comedy central special at just 19 years old when i was 19 i was doing three grams of molly per weekend and going thousands of dollars in a debt how do they do it he recorded his first full hour comedy special a year later titled words words words words is fine i don't like it okay i don't like it it contains most of the stuff he seems to be apologizing for on the song problematic from inside i imagine he would cringe through a viewing it was 2010 comedy was edgy fill in the blanks the songs are bad and he goes full lyrical spiritual miracle multiple times which is another white person rap music faux pas to relax my mind it's like a walk by the clock and i pass the time his talent is still obvious and it's still hyper creative and funny but i don't like the songs and there's a lot of racy 2010 stuff that wouldn't slide today and i'm not gonna show it cause he was a kid oh my god let him grow up 2010 was a different [ __ ] playing field i was in the eighth grade working on a lego star wars stop-motion youtube channel and one of her videos that i scripted very passionately got 3.5 million views we were children there's almost definitely some racism in there somewhere i do remember our stereotypical asian accent was offered gleefully from our beloved asian friend and then the uh stereotypical gay accent was by me so i think that we are skirting by on a technicality leather youtube was a wasteland of a website no reaction videos no video essays no makeup tutorials god knows no jimmy fallon lip sync battles channel awesome didn't exist 10 years ago let alone lindsay ellis it was just smosh and nine year olds throwing spaghetti at a chalkboard unaware they were penning the tour of modernity bo burnham wrote a silly song in his junior year of high school uploaded it to youtube in 2006 so he could send it to his brother easily and then 10 million people ate it like a deer carcass and you know what that teenager did he responded to the positive attention slathered on his impressionable mind via an unprecedented means of mass communication and he wrote more silly songs to share with his new strange kind of audience and he's talented and he's funny and people smiled so why am i rolling my eyes when he dares to try to inject meaning into the medium that we damned him to as a child by the way nobody better come for me for being hard on burnham in his work want to know why because he told me to my fans they stick with me through everything through thick and thin do not stick with me through thick if i stop entertaining you throw me to the curb he's actually the only person who enforces the performance audience divide consciously with outright hostility as much as i do i love you no you [ __ ] don't i appreciate it at arm's length it simply is what it is some really good jokes that i love some musical comedy which i am burnham himself seems to not totally love his now i'm going to make a point moment if you have a line in there that is if you can live without an audience you should do it um the liners say to give you what he cannot give himself um i had felt like i had really exhausted myself as a subject like truly i mean i was like so tired of my head like just you know i mean truly like i didn't like expressing myself through myself anymore and we got eighth grade out of it too great movie and we got an amazing run of interviews that beau burnham did to promote eighth grade where he's trying to stick to his rehearsed talk show friendly anecdotes but is constantly losing his temper and going on rants about capitalism and big tech it's exceedingly satisfying we're applying a like capitalist whatever like streamlining logic to literally our emotions and our souls comrade bow like the internet was the super the internet super highway where it's like libraries are everywhere and now it's literally our well-being wait what our attention is being colonized until there will be none left the currency of of the time being attention is very personal oh how much of my day what is my free time what is my attention this thing really is going after my conscious ex experience of the world the internet when it was me was like oh youtube post something you do there as opposed to what the internet is now on youtube and all these things live there be there i don't think adults understand the internet at all at [ __ ] all they literally think like they introduce hashtags and memes yeah what are these kids doing with their hashtags and memes not knowing that like under their nose the brain chemistry of their children is changing in real time like the way the children view their own image and soul and relate to their own sense of self is changing questioning what i was doing and like the ethics of what i'm doing i blame comedy for 80 of it i do swear to god this is a tough business i know you're a tough guy jeff and it's and we need to have it's his medium because you'd be in jail secretary clinton oh my god he learned everything he he needed to learn at the comedy central roast learned it's not a joke learned everything everything it's funny that's objectively funny [ __ ] bo there seems to be a lot of speculation that make happy especially the ending hinted that you're potentially putting stand up to bed for a while is there any truth to the speculation definitely going to take some time off for a while i'm a little tired of myself and i'd love to write things for other people the sort of goodbye ending of the special has much heavier reasons for wanting to leave which are a portion of but not the whole reason can we know what the steeper meaning is i don't know can you yep let's do it part five we are already cyborgs earlier this month i had to walk somewhere that i had not walked before unfortunately my phone was dead it's always dead it's an iphone 6 it barely functions i had to figure out a way to get there without google maps so i simply wrote down the directions on a little slip of paper and i walked out of the door raw doggy metropolis when i reached a crossroad i would simply look at my little slip of paper and follow directions like a soldier in nazi germany sorry i was adorable walking around with my little list the walk was about 40 minutes and again my phone was dead so i couldn't listen to music the entire time i was trapped inside of my shitty head with myself frequently while i underwent this journey the thought came to me well your phone's in your pocket why don't you just check your phone i had to tell my instincts no you can't the phone is dead then my instincts responded well why didn't you just screenshot it while you had wi-fi and then take that with you and i had to respond that doesn't make sense the phone is dead then i thought okay well why didn't you just screenshot it on your laptop at home and then send that to your phone and then you would have the picture i had to keep responding to my urges you can't the phone is dead you wrote the directions on a slip of paper because that was the best option you had my brain knew that but my body didn't it was trying to use a limb that was no longer there a cyborg is a human who through technological modifications gains superhuman abilities we're used to seeing cyborgs in science fiction cartoons and superhero movies but that definition a human being who through technological modifications gain superhuman abilities that's you right now how are you watching me right now we are not in the same place how did you mod your eyes you ever accidentally tried to control f a book in real life how much time do you spend not only living your life but documenting it on facebook instagram and twitter how much of yourself would you feel you've lost if every archived post and chat history and all your social media accounts vanish tomorrow if you no longer had access to your phone your laptop and the internet how much of your daily professional and personal life can still function how much of your life do you enact through a screen is not a significant part of who you are already housed in technological non-physical spaces the increase of pragmatic utility through technology makes cool and is sense obviously i like that my shitty iphone 6 can contain more music on it than a warehouse full of vinyls could ever but you don't just use technology for utility you enact entire relationships through it you're quietly subconsciously deciding every waking moment of your life whether or not you're going to post about what you're currently living the internet is not something we use it is a limb of our body we are constantly aware of the universally intuitively understood immaterial experience of self doesn't understand the difference between your eyes being the wall through which you hallucinate the universe and your phone screen being the wall through which you hallucinate the universe the amount of time that you spend in the hyper reality of the internet is real time on a personal note in spite of and because of my writing quirk of going out of my way to point out you don't know me i owe you nothing give me money [ __ ] you are yet developing an emotional bond with me i thought it would be funny to emphasize the one-sided nature of that bond and it could maybe even potentially help my audience have more conscious boundaries i fret on occasion it's done precisely the opposite i can highlight all i want that this is a transaction we are currently partaking in i do actually get money from your laughter and your attention your one-sided feelings towards me don't mean i have to do anything for you at all i owe you [ __ ] all i have a rich life outside of the internet and you people as much as you might enjoy my work don't really know me to me you're just a blob of compliments that will morph into an abusive mob when my time comes but my subjective reality isn't the only one that exists i can't deny your masked lived experience your feelings are valid you do know this ghost of me and this isn't a character this is how i talk in real life this is what i think is funny this is what i think my friends tell me these videos feel exactly what it's like to hang out with me at 3am when i decide to be slightly excited about something i am successfully manipulating your senses to simulate a truth of who i am someone called the president a youtuber is about to talk about parasocial relationships a parasocial relationship as you well know is when an individual develops an intimate attachment to a performer that doesn't know that they exist the term was initially invented to describe the relationship that audience members have with tv stars once the tv became commonplace in the family home then of course the concept gained new life when the phenomena of social media stars arose the immediacy and democratization that came with social media and youtube eroded the performer audience divide to practical non-existence nowadays online discourse about the problematic aspects of parasocial relationships is extremely popular but using parasocial as a derogatory term might be the third step of a conversation we're on the fourth step of first youtube and social media happen making the gap between performers and audiences seemingly non-existent creators and audiences thought they were friends secondly this melding of the performer and audience resulted in toxic fan bases with unhealthy emotional investment and expectations for people that didn't even know they existed the audience could feel personally betrayed by transgressions or exhibit inappropriately invasive behavior in general third online creators struck back making video essays and establishing boundaries about how it's [ __ ] up that you think that they're your friend and please don't treat us like that that's weird audiences gained the vocabulary to understand this dynamic and began somewhat self-policing in regards to parasociality some creators still actively cultivate parasocial bonds for money but the awareness is out there that parasociality exists and is bad which brings us to the present moment parasocial relationship is a [ __ ] meme people freely interact with the concept ironically admitting that they experience it while simultaneously demonstrating awareness as to its problematic aspects when the balanced informed take becomes the meme i tend to think of that as a cultural victory and concurrent to the memory and the glorious backlash to the backlash to the backlash the reality is setting in that expecting audiences to not have any sort of emotional relationship with performers is unreasonable of course you're allowed to have feelings about someone you're a fan of you're a person it'd be weird if you manage not to the pendulum at least in this very niche area of the entertainment industry seems to be kind of landing in the middle we have the vernacular to describe the experience that we are all sharing so what do we do we still live in reality so we know what not to do what do we do i put myself in the very weird position of making part of my brand drawing attention to parasociality with a hostile tone while also actively cultivating it with my audience am i a hypocrite not really what's the difference between authentically connecting with an audience as a performer and crafting a parasocial relationship they're the same thing our relationship is valid just not intimate parasocial non-derogatory the things i make are very effective representations of my identity this isn't a bit i unfortunately am very much like this and that's what i've managed to monetize my brain my heart my personality this is the transaction through which i now pay rent this is part of me i'm giving away to people i don't know for money i'm literally selling my soul and you you're giving away your soul for free our feeds and our posts and our endless scrolling occupy so much brain real estate because they're part of us part of how we live part of who we are and how we understand each other we are already cyborgs bonded to the internet practically and emotionally our souls inhabiting both the physical reality and this new hyper compressed jump cut laden meme tainted digital realm just because your microchip is physically outside of your body doesn't mean it's any less connected to your brain so honestly don't worry about if we're going to become half computer bionic creatures with implants inside of our brain that allow us to access the internet instantaneously don't worry about if we're going to simulate reality so effectively that it's indistinguishable from the real thing and don't worry about if we're gonna upload all of our consciousnesses to a mass network where we can live forever we already did it and that just happened part six transhumanism and luddism transhumanism is the belief that our descendants will be strange and wonderful that humanity is a work in progress that we can use technology to be smarter and happier and live longer and healthier transhumanism is the philosophy concerning and general advocation for humanity's potential to modify itself with technology to the point that we are beyond human in unrelated but good news transhumanism was added to the pride flag this year to surmise this concept glibly we are already cyborgs and it's only gonna get worse and by worse i do generally mean better take for example the extremely clear-cut case of amputees and prosthetics that's a human transcending their biological limitations through technology i don't think you try to bully an amputee out of getting a sick robot arm after all between five and seven million years ago we underwent trans apism to revolutionize ourselves into what we are today in no small part through technology just more like holy [ __ ] i made fire and purpose technology grog you [ __ ] my wife i will beat you to death with this tree limb technology our evolutionary drive towards survival and progress pulls us towards technological transcendence old people are slower to get with the program but time marches on and it's not a mystery as to why older people are slower to adopt new technologies it's evolutionary once more we have a fear of the unknown and attachment to the familiar because the familiar makes us still alive and the unknown might eat us but like many of our deep primal instincts these impulses are not always useful in civilized society fear of the unknown is what causes otherizing which reportedly is not good and does racism and stuff it also has made every scientific advancement throughout the course of history accompanied by protest and fear-mongering people thought photographs would steal your soul they thought medicine was playing god they thought that online dating would destroy romance we keep being okay technology is always scary because it's new even when it's obtusely convenient but humanity always gets over that fear and absorbs the technology into us until it isn't scary young people first old people ask it's a recognizable pattern paradigm shifting tech is invented feared disseminated familiarized becomes ubiquitous and then we forget there was ever a time we didn't have it it seems like it's in our very nature we can't stop inventing new technologies we can't stop trying to find solutions to our problems one could easily argue that transhumanism is the logical continuation of our evolution we don't know what it would feel like to be the creatures so technologically advanced that they cease to become human any more than we can really understand what human beings were like in the medieval times or much less pre-human primates so ceasing to become human is not necessarily as scary as it might seem on the face of it we are simply calmly stepping towards technological advancement and a different state of being with increased productivity increased knowledge and better lives why wouldn't we this is the real optimistic ethos of transhumanism we live in a world where there is suffering and inconvenience we are collaborative imaginative and inventive by nature we want to solve all of our problems and our uniquely human reality shattering tool to do so is technology for want of infinity stones with the advent of the internet and handheld devices we have finally truly made ourselves cyborgs we've created the infrastructure with which to alter ourselves to genuine super human intelligence and hyper consciousness the problem is it takes a while to swipe and then you have to type your code in and then you need to wait for it to and then you have to type once the computer knows what to do it can do it way faster than you the reason it takes so long to send a text is because we have to go through all these steps of from our brain to our bodies to tell it what to do and it's spending all its energy just trying to be open and able to do whatever we tell it to do but it takes us a long time to tell what to do so like if we could shorten the time between the the when we the brain microchips is what i'm saying [Music] this is a real thing so we have to talk about it like it's real wipe your mind of dystopian science fiction books you read in high school remember that you have an innate fear of the unknown that isn't always helpful and most importantly remember you're already a cyborg it's hard to remember a time that we didn't make jokes about our devices listening to us we expect targeted advertising you probably got a targeted ad on this video if you're watching it without adblock which if you are doing that you're making me more money but why why are you doing that just download adblock we know a youtube algorithm is tracking our behavior and using it to decide what we and others see i know that you guys know it because you won't [ __ ] stop commenting on my goddamn videos and you savvy internet user know intuitively that it's not a person doing this no dude is sitting in a room listening to your conversations mega corporations don't care about what you individually are doing what's listening is artificial intelligence pay attention even though it's scary it's about your life human beings made giant programs that are very smart they track every second of your online behavior and then they break that behavior down to data sets more comprehensive than any human being could even try to read the programs then use the data to automatically generate your feed they give you your ads they prioritize your google search results they curate your recommended tab this is the primary function of ai in the world today giant programs doing mass surveillance tweaking themselves slightly so they can please you in particular they do it so that you will look at your screen longer and spend more time in the app they do it so that they can charge advertisers more for having their ads in the app that everybody's looking at that's what ai really is not a robot with a human face that talks or whatever it's data collection and experience curation that helps corporations make more profit it doesn't have consciousness it's nowhere really close to having consciousness but it does think a lot faster than us a computer can solve equations and perform basic operations 10 million times faster than you a human being hasn't been the best chess player in the world since 1997. we have a fraught relationship with ai it serves us but it controls us it's smarter than us but it follows our directives and as previously stated we are cyborgs we created the internet and we created the phones and we created the ai but now the ai is inside of us deciding what we see and we're too entangled to ever actually disconnect from it now that you know you can google anything and immediately get the answer you're not gonna relinquish this power as soon as you can make your thumbs express an idea or a question you have every answer and resource you can possibly imagine at your fingertips our thumbs are the thing between us and the incomprehensible power of ai but ai doesn't need thumbs it can move its metaphorical thumbs thousands of times in a microsecond so what if we did manage to make a super intelligent artificial life that had conscious thought and desires it would be thinking so fast that it wouldn't want to talk to us at a certain point it's like talk they have like toiletry so it's out of our control it regards us as essentially insects and also by the way can improve itself at an inconceivably fast rate we would no longer be the apex predator and if we can simulate reality to the degree it's indistinguishable from humanity if all of our relationships rely on technology if that's where we get all of our news and interact with everything in the world and we use cards to pay for things that uh it's problematic so problematic that it is the only thing that billionaire tech giant and man elon musk is actually in support of regulation for i try to convince people to slow down slow down ai to regulate ai this was futile i tried for years comrade elon we all tend to rag on elon musk for being the microchip brain guy but he only got into the brain microchip business after years of trying to get politicians to legislate against it to no avail you ever met with obama and just for one reason look just talk about ai i met with congress i i was at a meeting of all 50 governors and talked about just ai danger and i talked to everyone i could then when everyone ignored him he said [ __ ] it i'll do it first then and i'll make it symbiotic with the human mind so that we can become trans human ai cyborg geniuses and we won't get left behind by hyper-intelligent artificial life the merge scenario with ai is the one that seems like probably the best like if you if you can't beat it join it a far cry from trying to subjugate humanity underneath an ai overlord he's trying to weasel humanity into continued supremacy in a world that is evolving frighteningly quickly the neurolink he's currently developing is designed to fix neurological issues like paralysis and seizures that's not a bad thing the primal fear of the brain microchip is just the latest manifestation of the eternal evolutionary fear of the unknown you'd think we'd be equally afraid of a constantly listening voice activated device on our home with a camera and microphone that controls all the technology around us but some of you psychos went and bought that [ __ ] in other words i know a brain chip is scary give it a little time you'll get over it the microchip could start by just solving epilepsy forever and then it could advance to fixing alzheimer's forever and then it might just start to make more sense for people that spend most of their time at their computer anyways several updates later eventually the chipped people might be operating at such a high level it'll be strange to talk to the unchipped you literally could fundamentally change the way human beings interface with each other yes yes you wouldn't need to talk what the day-to-day experience of the ai symbiotic neo-human would be is like having constant access to all the functions of your phone without the input output delay of your eyes and hands as in whatever you could accomplish on a phone or laptop in 10 minutes or even hours you could accomplish in a microsecond consider the implications you can now speak every language on the planet you automatically have the solution to every math problem and existence you can read a book in seconds you have all wikipedia memorized on instant recall all of your memories are rendered in perfect clarity you will never forget anything ever again you don't have to speak with your mouth anymore you can converse with other trans humans at [ __ ] light speed yeah you just wouldn't be human anymore huh there will always be groups of people that resist adopting technology in this case more than ever due to the existential nature of it all and then people may decide that they want to retain their biological self or not i think they'll probably choose to retain their biological self but the neo-humans will annihilate classical humans intellectually and economically they will work faster smarter and harder than you to a ridiculous degree there is no financial incentive to hiring a human when you could have the productivity of a superhuman the mind to ai interface is the logical conclusion of a path we've been on for a very long time but people have been questioning the morality and direction of that path for an equally long time in the english city of nottingham in 1811 a loose political group that came to be known as the luddites began an onslaught of protests and acts of political violence but their enemy was no race nor creed it was machines they destroyed automated textile machines with hammers and in several cases burned manufacturing plants full of them to the ground they took their name from ned lud a guy who supposedly flew into a fit of rage after being reprimanded for laziness at his job and then smashed some workplace machine to bits the luddites appropriated this story into folklore claiming him as their leader in spitting mythology about his epic anti-machine prowess the uprisings lasted for years and the government cracked down on them hard you know how governments crack down on social movements this working class movement lasted less than a decade but the name luddite has lived on into modern society to describe people who are anti-technology or anti-progress in general this all sounds very familiar fear of the unknown automated things spooky but the luddites weren't actually against technology they didn't start breaking machines because they thought the devil was inside of them or something in fact the luddites were primarily skilled workers themselves they were the people that actually knew how the machines worked they knew that the machines don't need a lunch break or a salary and as such would save corporations masses of money they knew that as a result of this fact the corporation was going to lay off as many workers as possible and replace them with automation they knew that the financial gains would come at the loss of their quality of life the corporations weren't unsuccessful when operated by workers it's not like they were losing money so they had to switch to automated work so that they would become profitable it's that they realized they could make more money if they just didn't make the well-being of its workers immediately the priority in their defense capitalism intends to be logical and fair not kind money is just a symbol of value you do something valuable for society you get money it's essentially value credit and you can cash in however you want so individuals and corporations gain profit by adding value to society and if they can add more value then they make more profit and if you aren't making money it's simply because you aren't providing value people aren't going to give money to things that they don't want or need that's life so because of the invention of these automated machines the labor of the workers simply cease to be valuable that's just life they shouldn't be kept on as charity cases where we just all pretend that their work is still valuable when it clearly empirically isn't anymore in the name of improving our society healthy economic competition and ingenuity we shouldn't cuddle and infantilize them we should incentivize them to go do something that's actually valuable it's hard to accept sometimes that what you're doing isn't valuable anymore if you've been doing it for a while but you shouldn't kid yourself you're an adult find out how to contribute to society in a more meaningful way instead of just whining about it so that's me doing a capitalism and here's me doing the non-capitalism a corporation saw an opportunity to increase profit at the expense of the lives of thousands and they did it without a second thought because [ __ ] them they don't have money or power so we can do whatever we want regardless of what they think or need we can increase our profits which is our job what what are they going to do smash the machines with hammers ludism was never about fearing machinery it was a violent declaration that there are values that are not profitable there are things in life that supersede profit increase i know this is easier for you i know it'll make you more money but it makes all of our lives worse in a very immediate way how is this adding value to humanity aren't we building things for us capitalism apologists claim that money shows you where value is if everyone works hard and everyone gives their money to the best goods and services and the market is free then profit will end up where the best values are cool theory didn't work out profit isn't value value is value don't let them convince you they're the same thing the ai symbiotic transhumans will access a new echelon of productivity but they will lose the impermanence and effervescence that defines the human conscious experience if we put profit over all other values then ai symbiosis is the only option forward if you don't adopt it you will be left behind your work will not be as useful to a mega corporation that only cares about increasing their profit but there are other values this is a spiritual transcendence we're talking about if we are to do it we should do it freely we should do it for us not for [ __ ] profit bludism and transhumanism are not at odds with each other capitalism is driving a wedge between them our assumed consent and this unanimous obsession with profit and progress and optimization without regard for the soul of humanity is poison the human soul is worth more than money the decision to transcend into another state of being should not be for profit it's possible to make goods services and products while actually making real decisions based on values that transcend those things it's possible or alternatively you can maximize profit without any regard for our future for anyone with less power than you what it means to be human or the nature of our souls guess which one your shareholders want you to do guess what we taught ai to do regulate the [ __ ] to hell and back of course should be regulated they should be part seven customer obsession at the very top of the list is one i've already mentioned but you'll probably hear it ten times throughout tonight because it's so central and it is customer obsession jeff bezos is nothing if not a man of principles his business ethos his creative drive his willingness to innovate it all comes under the banner of one singularity the guiding light the through line between the cool memo his victory in various sectors of commerce and his immunity from government regulation it's all about customer obsession his sole focus always at the forefront of his mind and all the people that work for him is making the customer experience the best it can possibly be this is what business is all about you create a good or provide a service that makes people's lives better and if it does make people's lives better then people will pay money for it because it's worth it your business will succeed the best if you're providing the best service then you amass capital because you've proven yourself as someone who can create value in the world around you so now you have the authority to invest in new ideas bezos is so committed to this principle that he operated amazon at a loss for 10 years because he knew he was providing the most effective and convenient thing and people just needed to catch up and they did we are going to forego profits in order to take market share that our strategy is to lose money which enables us then to put other companies out of business who can't afford to lose money at the very beginning he's signaling to shareholders i have a strategy to monopolize the market but this waiting game of low prices and untapped internet convenience was only part of bezos's customer obsession technique the other part that amazon introduced to the world of commerce was mass surveillance so we could see what you looked at we could also see what you paused at uh we could see what you put in your basket but didn't order we could see what you put in your basket and did order so that's when we started to realize man this is rich every second of your behavior while interacting with any of amazon's services is and always has been meticulously recorded and fed back into an ai system meant to optimize your experience every second on amazon.com every second on prime video on your kindle in the kindle store imdb audible twitch whole foods here's some data i have on you mass of people watching this video this is more detail than i know what to do with i suppose i could hire someone to break down this data and mastermind the business strategy of content creation that would maximize my profits according to the trends but that feels antithetical to creativity authenticity and everything that i have inside of my heart but if i the person who didn't ask for this data and doesn't give a [ __ ] about it has this much imagine how much amazon has too much for any human being to parse and analyze but not too much for ai to read and artificial intelligence doesn't have any qualms about optimizing content based on data sets they are programmed to be obsessed with the customer we deserve the best service possible people do tend to have a natural revulsion to the idea that their behavior is being monitored but is this not just yet again another quirk of the fear of the unknown just our natural discomfort with big concepts that make us feel like we lack agency even though we could get hit by a bus any second our eroding privacy is becoming less and less scary the more familiar we become with it kids don't have any issue turning on their snapchat location so everyone can see where they are at all times we don't give even a little bit of a [ __ ] when we hit yes on terms of services on any website we're posting our whole lives online completely willingly we make memes about flirting with the fbi agent that's monitoring us how much do we really care about being watched anymore do people want privacy because they seem to put everything on the internet we're not getting thought crimed by this invasion of privacy hell even the new nazis aren't getting deleted the surveillance is being put to use for our benefit they're gathering information about our lives so that they can improve our lives the best they possibly can they're recording us to fulfill our wishes what's wrong with that it's the beating heart of amazon pinpointing convenience and quality of life than giving it to us in overwhelmingly specific fashion we did not think about it as exploiting we thought about helping people make better decisions customer obsession that's us he's dedicating all of his energy towards making our lives better so if we're gonna reward someone for the value they've provided the planet if we're gonna put anyone in charge of so much shouldn't it be someone who worships the customer what's the problem here the problem is this you're not a customer you're a person don't let them convince you they're the same thing they're obsessed with the piece of you that is profitable your consumption doesn't define you it's a state you sometimes enter due to necessity it's not you customer obsession is synonymous with exploiting the weaknesses of the human mind to extract as much profitable behavior as possible i was starting to feel that that was less respectful toward the consumer who was after all supposed to be our god and it was closer to getting a cow into a milking stall and extracting as many panels as possible during each visit bezos with the power of the internet in the mandate of capitalism funneled mass surveillance into artificial intelligence with the solitary goal of profit customer obsession pushed beyond the realm of the humans so when we invented social media to connect the world and this method of communication and new medium of living needed to make a profit to continue existing we already knew the best way to generate it every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded exactly what image you stop and look at for how long you look at it the social dilemma is a 2020 documentary that is very frustrating to watch on one hand the mass is a slew of whistleblowers from within the tech industry to illuminate exactly how social media apps are designed to addict you and lock you into an endless scroll of recommended content so that they can maximize profitability often at the expense of your psyche if you're not paying for the product then you are the product companies like this their business model is to keep people engaged on the screen let's figure out how to get as much of this person's attention as we possibly can we're the product our attention is the product being sold to advertisers it's true and they should say it on the other hand the stupid [ __ ] filmmakers added this awful fictional plotline about a kid getting addicted to his phone and radicalized by fake news that just reeks of an adult trying to explain to children how spooky your [ __ ] phones are explaining the unchecked amoral big tech business model of colonizing our attention spans for profit with the strategies of a slot machine very good secret agent hackerman fanfic very bad good bad i let that know that she's typing so we don't lose him activating ellipsis i actually serendipitously found my old private alt twitter account just yesterday and i found a tweet from almost two years ago when i first saw the film and i said the exact same thing that i wrote in the script and since i'll likely delete it now that i've mentioned it publicly here's the greatest hits and proof i've always been this way feel free to pause and appreciate my id this documentary is so important for raising the baseline awareness of social media as an industry in the role of artificial intelligence in our lives and it's so offset by this shitty little edgy short film they wrote for it i have like a thousand more snips to send before dinner i knew if she logged onto friendbook.com we were dead reducing the entirety of the emotional online experience to getting cyberbullied and getting addicted to notifications just betrays an ignorance to what it feels like to truly be immersed in social media yes we all are addicted to it because of the slot machine psychological tricks they're playing but also we live there we think there we feel there the internet when it was me was like oh youtube post something you do there as opposed to what the internet is now in youtube and all these things live there be there twitter and instagram what do you think what do you look like what do you think what do you look like those are base weird deep questions that are being asked of kids i've met people i love through the internet ongoing relationships the for-profit cultivating of addiction is exactly half of what customer obsession is it's not just turning people to zombies it's also turning them into trans humans and neither of those things should be done for profit because just like some things are valuable but not profitable some things are profitable but not valuable like polarized politics and culture wars it worries me that an algorithm that i worked on is actually increasing polarization in society but from the point of view of watch time this polarization is extremely efficient at keeping people online people jovially quip about the recommendation algorithm and internet rabbit holes and we shouldn't be making jokes we don't fully understand what it is we're taking this customer obsession thing at face value and presuming that the algorithms are trying to tailor an experience to us personally but they're not people think that the algorithm is designed to give them what they really want and it's not the algorithm is actually trying to find a few rabbit holes that are very powerful and try to find which rabbit hole is the closest to your interest the recommendation rabbit holes are not just for you they're using your personal algorithm to guide you towards mass tested algorithms the quicker they can get you into a mass grave proven addictive whole of leftist video essayists or white conservative talky dudes or fail compilations or gaming the better no matter where you start from it's always going to be trying to guide you to the most mathematically addictive recommended holes regardless of the ideology or content just because it guarantees your eyes glued to the screen for the longest amount of time which means you're going to see the most ads which means they can get the most money from advertisers this entire process is controlled entirely by ai who are only programmed to maximize profit the content doesn't matter at any point in all of this no one is plotting the ideological end point of the colonization of your attention no one even knows what you're looking at the algorithm doesn't understand if posts are political or comedic or left or right or fake or real it literally just doesn't know the only thing it understands is how long people are looking at the screen because that's where the money comes from and the only thing it was told to do was generate profit it's doing its job according to the parameters of success we laid out algorithms are not objective algorithms are optimized to some definition of success it's usually profit we programmed them to be customer obsessed because profit supposedly indicates value but when you're being a person instead of a customer it thinks it's failing when you're engaging in a politics that isn't as profitable and addictive in online and reductive it feels like it's failing and wants the customer to come back so the algorithmic solution to this is to turn every aspect of being a person into a customer behavior your feelings your friendship your your love your politics your thought every every [ __ ] [ __ ] everything the internet isn't just entertainment it's where we learn our politics enact relationships experience friendship express our fears and our hopes and that's customer behavior and it's being streamlined our souls are being streamlined into profitable groups as much as possible it's altering us it's more complicated than addiction it's your soul what do you want me to say [ __ ] we programmed the ai to be customer obsessed so it wants us to behave as customers which means consuming reliably predictably constantly through their medium but the medium is also inviting us to be people on it to engage in politics in learning and thought in feeling and friendship in love in being so our souls are being streamlined into recommendation holes your soul i also understand that you have some very long snapchat streaks so that's another thing that i not fully uh in a streak means that you and one of your snapchat friends have both snapped each other a picture or video within a 24-hour period for at least three consecutive days i still have one that's 1971 days which is like i think five years or something like that four or five one thousand seven one thousand nine hundred and seventeen almost two thousand so almost two thousand so so and about that one so that's with your partner right yes yeah um that you've had since like high school um yeah since yeah so uh for a variety of reasons uh you and this partner did go through a bit of a rough patch like two years ago and although you're through now you very much were not dating for a while so yes yet the snapchat screen maintained throughout every part of this so why i mean it was like half the reason was because we didn't just stop talking all together right we continued talking which that's its own thing the other thing was that it was not only on my mind but it was on their mind that like if we like if we were breaking up if we did end i would be ending this like 1500 day snapchat streak which actually became a big deal like i don't know it's something that i i thought about then and i still think about now like if it were to end like i'd have to end that snapchat because it is kind of a thing of i don't know pride for me i guess well it's kind of wondrous like you built it it's like evidence of such commitment and time yeah it is evidence of commitment in time which is kind of scary but yeah so get that and i'm i'm glad i did because of course yeah now it's now it's still there but i don't know if it's a 2 000 and beyonce yeah yeah not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery but the internal and spiritual also for the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone but our modes of thought and feeling men are grown mechanical in head and in heart as well as in hand part 8 the transhuman souls of children i love me and ominous part title what is the soul different cultures and philosophers and religions have offered varying definitions plato wrote fanfic about it stevie wonder definitely has it but beyond that we are far from consensus most of us realize there's probably not a ghost that inhabits our bodies that lives on after we die probably i don't know quantum physics is weird but the term soul refuses to leave our vocabulary it's too relevant to our lived experience science can tell us all at once something something determinism love is chemicals you're an animal but that's not how it feels and 100 of us agree on that science can't explain the sensation of our souls we can try to break down conscious experience to data in numbers but it does a deep disservice to the actual experience of being alive whether or not you believe there is literally an eternal essence inside of every human body no one is confused as to why someone would feel that way the reason we give a [ __ ] enough to make art do philosophy and debate morality is because being a person is so much more complicated than just dominating the food chain or advancing science forward the self is something that emerges from our bodies and our minds and our feelings and our friends in the world and all of our memories working in tandem to create something nebulous but inescapable the self is worthy of analysis our ability to look inward and see our vulnerabilities and consider who we are is more human than the [ __ ] stock market when we refer to a human moment we tend to be referring to our fallibility our slowness our limitations our contradictions the emotionally honest parts that make life beautiful after you've produced all of your goods and services to make life last longer and happen more efficiently then you have to live it it's gotta be worth it that's not a matter of math or science that's your soul one can obviously be rich and productive and unhappy money isn't valued so for the purposes of our pertinent discussion let the soul be defined as the amalgamation of every part of us that contributes towards our hallucination of self and meaning simple enough got it so where does your soul exist it's grounded in your body without which it wouldn't exist so it's partially your body and it's also your experience of consciousness and thought it's you the way you intuitively understand you we don't need numbers to back that up you know what that is the u part the part that cares about [ __ ] and [ __ ] and that part doesn't know the difference between waking life and the internet when you're in vr you can turn into some weird creature you can turn into some weird crab or something and the whole world can change and yet you remain there hanging and i feel as if you notice that your consciousness is this real thing and i find that experience just amazing to when everything becomes mutable suddenly you realize wow there is like some consciousness thing that's not just mechanism your soul is perfectly comfortable existing in both realms it's intangible and malleable enough to do that so i implore you not to think of time spent on the internet posting performing or ingesting content as something you do external to yourself you're not just pressing buttons with your thumbs and swiping and looking at things you're inside of it and it is inside you any adults that are watching this who grew up without the internet and don't spend much time online might feel like this sounds a little insane social media is just pictures and writing how could that be your soul but i've had intimate moments on facetime and facebook chat i've had traumatic experiences on twitter and instagram i've had friendship ending arguments on snapchat me and all of my friends have spent giant swaths of our lives curating our social media branding deciding what sort of tone we want to strike online it's an environment wherein i've felt loneliness and community it's dictated my self-esteem positively and negatively it's my job now it's my livelihood we're spending hours every day inside of the internet instead of in the physical world i'm absolutely in this [ __ ] i've been around for a while but nowhere near as much as kids younger than me are i thought i grew up with on the internet until i met these kids and i think i realized i probably grew up with the internet i also grew up with the internet i've seen each of these platforms start as a tool and then transform and mature into the infrastructure through which people enact relationship conversation expression but not far under me are generations for whom social media has always been present youtube didn't exist when i was five now five-year-olds want to be youtubers every descending generation is increasingly symbiotic with the internet in intimately emotional ways that are hard to articulate to older generations so when you give a six-year-old an ipad and they can navigate the interface with greater deafness than you can it's because they learned how to use technology as an extension of self literally at the same time they learn to walk navigating a digital interface is like breathing to them because they learn to do both simultaneously you watch a baby with an ipad you realize like oh this thing is designed to appear to uh to appeal to us when we literally can't even think i was on a flight earlier this month sat beside this young pair of parents and their bouncy little baby girl throughout most of this flight the very young child was preoccupied with the popular single-player video game doc mcstuffins baby nursery the level she was playing was centered around giving a baby a bath a baby maybe one year younger than her she poked the screen to pop bubbles and turned the shower on and off in such activities as these at one point she accidentally pulled up a towel that dried the baby but it also covered the baby and you know how babies like seeing human faces so she didn't like that she wanted the towel to go away so she tried to make it go away by tapping her most reliable tool to enact change in this digital interface and it didn't work and she got angry she verbalized her displeasure and continued poking with increased ferocity and then she tried to reach into the screen to grip the towel and pull it down they don't know it's not real if she can't tell the difference between an ipad screen and reality even physically of course it's real to her emotionally and it will be forever with ceaselessly escalating realism and immersion kids really feel the internet in their bones you mean it's they don't even see it as this other thing that you know people on cnn will talk about when they talk about like are hashtags ruining our youth like you don't even have you know like your turn you don't even understand what this thing is this is the achilles heel of older generations trying to talk about the internet your brains are not as interfaced with it as ours you lack the fluency to even have the conversation you're declaring pepe the frog i hate symbol while tick tock is doing [ __ ] like this and you don't even get why it's funny today is also my birthday and because it's my birthday i get to introduce you to my girlfriend so my birthday so my birthday also my birthday is also my birthday you don't want to do this currently holding his girlfriend hostage man is currently holding his girlfriend hostage my fellow americans i know we are all aware of the current market situation development that's literally what a boomer meme is it's the broken english of internet comedy that's why older people text weird they don't get how we understand tone they don't get the etiquette our souls exist online it's not just an addiction it's an extension of reality and somehow bo burnham is the only man alive to ever represent this cinematically in non-embarrassing fashion eighth grade was bo burnham's directorial debut chronicling the inner drama of a 13 year old growing up in the modern era starring elsie fisher you might know lc fisher as the best twitter account the movie was advertised with taglines that highlighted its effective vivid representation of the awkward preteen experience but in practice it's much more so about how social media specifically has amplified the identity crisis of growing up the main character kayla puts a lot of stock in social media she finds her life uninteresting and unexciting and considers the internet her ticket out if she can be endorsed by the right person if she can perform correctly if she can ingest the right content her life might become as cinematic as she wants it to be the divide between unspectacular reality and the pristine curation of social media haunts her the anxiety of the movie is almost i wish the movie of my life sucks if anyone were to be watching me right now they would think i was really lame however despite this thematic framework through very deliberate direction the movie doesn't come down with an exaggerated lotus dance against social media the youtube videos that kayla makes are honest extensions of her they function in the film as our windows and her soul i don't necessarily think like performance is bad i don't think her videos are a lie i think trying to speak your truth into existence is beautiful kayla's not just addicted to the internet she's living inside of it and fascinatingly and pivotally there's no specific audience she's trying to satisfy she doesn't struggle with hate comments or [ __ ] cyber bullying or anything she's interacting with the potential of an audience a potential that is forever at her fingertips the knowledge that if one does self-document one can be seen the knowledge that as absorbed she is in the performance of others she too is being observed the stories we tell about the internet tend to revolve around the massive stars that's produced vloggers gamers political punnetts makeup gurus that a dude in the suit that eats burgers that everyone really likes 10 pull figures in the industry but the infrastructure that created those stars is available to all the medium of performance is that everyone's fingertips and everyone is performing with it constantly regardless of if they get likes the majority of people on the internet are expressing themselves to no one and expressing themselves to something more like god where it's just this sort of vacuum that they don't know if it's there or not at some point there were famous people and normal people and then the floor fell out and now it is a continuum that starts with one like and ends with kim kardashian and there is a ladder that everybody is on and the fame monster came down and like is haunting all of us the performer audience divide has collapsed in on itself hey you like knowing things about me you wanna know why i'm always telling you go [ __ ] yourself part nine the performer audience divide it's prison it's horrific it is performer and audience melded together the performer audience divide is something we seem to dislike in our bellies hence meet and greets hence super chats hence all you dm requesting me celebrities used to be very inaccessible you only saw them in newspapers and in movie theaters then the television brought celebrities into our homes then the internet made it so we can all larp as celebrities ourselves celebrity has been democratized comrade celebrity worship comrade commodification of identity comrade living every moment of your life as if it's a performance to be consumed regardless of how intimate and personal it is seminal sociologist juliet shore codified something called the new consumerism which describes a cultural shift from horizontal aspiration to vertical aspiration which simply means this at some point through technology we stopped comparing ourselves to our neighbors and peers and started comparing ourselves to celebrities and brands we're seeing many more expressions of wealth and status through media than we are through our actual community we're not wondering if what we made for the potluck is gonna be as good as what debra bought we're wondering if our hair looks as good as tandem monologues or if our friend group is as cool as dustin donksters juliet shore started talking about this as a result of the tv entering the family home with social media we have cranked it well over nine thousand we're watching the most famous and powerful people on the world perform on the same medium that we're performing on vertical aspiration feels like horizontal aspiration you scroll through that thing and in no particular order you will see your mother your friend from college the president of the united states um mcdonald's social media does that it really really blurs the line between what is the difference between me expressing to people and me performing a version of myself to people your own being becomes commodified performance is a state you enter like customer it's not inherently bad but it's not what makes you a person some people are born to be performers like me it's what i want and i'm good at it but even for me the more that my audience grows and a lot of my life literally becomes performance the more i'm in therapy talking about which parts of my life i need to keep militantly private so that i still feel like i belong to myself it's almost easier in a way when you're a performer professionally you can call your public activity work and your private activity your life but most kids automatically plugged into the internet before they had the capacity to speak a grammatically correct sentence don't have any boundary between their time as a performer and their time as an audience member performance through social media is so integrated into their existence that they don't see a difference between performing and living most of the time they've absorbed the anxiety of a performer into every second of their lives this sort of meta anxiety you feel by being on the internet um in a place where your sort of self is atomized into a you know a thousand different versions of you that are watching each other and taking inventory of each other and that anxiety is immensely profitable every time you you see it there on the counter and you just look at it and you know if you reach over it just it just might have something for you you play that slot machine to see what you got right that's not by accident that's a design technique it has us posting updates constantly so people still know we're alive it has us capable of transforming any aspect of our lives or any real world experience into a post it has us processing and expressing real complicated human emotions by tweeting or sharing memes the normalization of the performance of everything online and the pavlovian conditioning of addictive little dopamine boosts that are notifications and then the resulting performance anxiety incurred when you're not participating but you know it's all at your fingertips all this drives engagement it captures your attention and then sells the attention to advertisers that just want you to be more anxious and need more things and we all know the feeling of these things you get this little thrill oh somebody liked my stuff and it's being repeated or the punishment oh my god they don't like me maybe somebody else is more popular oh my god so you have those two very common feelings and they're doled out in such a way that you get caught in this loop everyone saw this coming when we fusion had together capitalism and consumerism there's no set structural limit to how much money you should be making or what can be monetized so if your attention and your soul can be transformed into a profitable predictable programmable commodity it will be done with enthusiasm if i put my capitalist hat back on i would say hey the corporation is providing a service it's their job it's not their fault if people find performing their lives valuable if you personally don't like it just unplug stop giving them your money and attention that's exactly what jaren lanier argues we should stop paying for this service that is inhumane and encourage big tech to change its business model to something less insidious with our wallets we call this body of ideas data dignity you should have the moral rights to every bit of data that exists because you exist you'll get paid for your data and more than you think plus you'll pay for services that are free now but in the balance you'll do better pay those people instead of having to resort to some sort of weird socialist solution that's how this works you give your money to things that you find valuable and you don't give your money to things that you think are bad in this case your attention is the money so it's as simple as just deleting your accounts which you are welcome to do you won't be arrested for doing that but we don't let children vote until they're 18 because we don't think that they're mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions so why in god's desecrated hell would they be good at voting with their baby attention spans against a mega corporation using casino techniques on their minds for that matter why do we expect any individual to win this psychological war against the most overwhelmingly powerful institutions in history that's the problem with individualism it's always preached by people for whom individualism worked you want to solve a social problem you need a social movement trying to solve a social problem with your little individual action that's a very sad undertaking good for you you've done the best you can with what you've been given holy [ __ ] look at all your agency i'm happy you have taken control over your own life through your own actions for real good for you i'm happy you overcame adversity but the system is still having its way with everybody else most people are just trying to scrape together a life worth living as they're shoved through systems that are impossibly larger than them systems are more powerful than individuals point blank the individualists that are always trying to tell you otherwise are always privileged as [ __ ] within the current system this economic freedom thing is manifesting as freedom for the most powerful organizations in the world to impose their will on humanity maybe we're deeply misunderstanding freedom this freedom of the strong is just a robbery of the freedom of the weak this is the problem with democracy this is the problem with the free internet i'm sorry it shouldn't be this free i think there should be regulation i don't think you should be able to be on the internet freely until you're 18. you can imagine these things are sort of like they tilt the floor of of human behavior you're always free to walk up the hill but fewer people do and so at scale at society scale you really are just tilting the floor and changing what billions of people think can do we tilted the floor and sent babies tumbling down the slanted ground and then we called them selfish for hitting their heads on the pavement we locked them in an endless matrix of mass surveillance and addiction and we're calling them the me generation as if they invented twitter as though they consciously asked to be floating behind themselves dissociatively constantly watching their own lives and self-documenting and branding never knowing an alternative reality not only are you present in the situation you are watching yourself live the situation you're watching other people watch you you're watching other people watch you watch them watch you the sensation of constant performance and having a million eyes on you that used to be reserved for celebrities now belongs to everyone at all times self-imposed and arbitrarily disseminated and i'm not trying to say that performance is bad and you shouldn't perform i'm passionate about this because i have a deep reverence for performance i'm a performer it's the thing i'm good at i want it i know that that means that my identity and my body and my mind will be commodified and consumed i know that means that people that i don't know will form a parasocial relationship with me i know that means that many of you will want to be my friend cool i don't want to be your friend i want you to be in awe of me that intimate appeal that offensive comedy has for me that i mentioned before the the shock induced authenticity it shocks you into being you and not the person watching themselves watching something can also be induced via transcendent artistic experiences what i want to do with an audience is give them that shock of authenticity i want to give the joy of excellence i want to provide the transcendent high of art i want to communicate something long form intentionally in a curated fashion designed to affect people and create more beauty in the world i could live stream more often and be witty and reap the donations i could post behind the scenes updates on instagram and boost my engagement and get people hyped up i could tweet my jokes and opinions to boost my social media presence i could apologize for errors and delays and oversights i could respond to comments i could make entire live streams where i just explained the video that i just created i could live my whole life as performance and my fans would gobble it up passionately i know this it would feel really good for both of us in the short term but i believe it would tarnish our performer audience relationship i don't want to try in vain to be your friend i don't want to sell my process as a product i want you to get the very best of me the performance the audience's lack of access to the process of creation and then the orgasmic high of a complete unapologetic product arriving that's part of it it's fun for me to get constant adoration from fans it's fun for you to feel like you're behind the veil but it tarnishes my process and it tarnishes how you ingest what i create you should look to your real-life friends to do the friendship part for you i promise i'll do a bad job of it from the side of the screen from me i hope you come to expect spectacle performance art i'm on the side of art overall laos whether i like it or not so i will cut you off as much as required to serve a completed product as cleanly as possible you shouldn't be trying to drag performers down to all the time and you shouldn't be trying to climb up to become a performer all the time either there are so many slow patient unexciting non-performative moments that are deeply valuable they're not profitable for anyone but they're valuable they contribute to a more meaningful life one where you walk away from performance when you have nothing finished to say and need to think and process and exist and then come back to performance when you have something intentional to offer there's a real assault on the creative process for people that were more or more interested in in longer form things that take some time it's really it's you have to resist a lot of uh impulses to to because it's very scary to think oh my god i'm dying i'm everyone's forgetting me right and as an audience you should be able to enjoy a performance and not feel like you need to perform to the performer you should be humbled and thrilled by a final product and then go home and digest it without reducing it to a tweet immediately the constant texture of the internet makes it so difficult not to mesh these two things together into one long half-finished stream of consciousness it's easy to forget that bo burnham was one of our first through the gates of social media stardom though i haven't been like posting a lot on youtube i'm watching the [ __ ] all the time really yeah all the time this is a youtube kid don't forget it just because he works his ass off to maintain the performer audience divide it was a struggle at every single turn i had to resist everything the thing was telling me to do you know i put out a comedy special every two years i would get 10 tweets a day are you dead what happened to you the creative process means to disappear and work on something and not to give a little bit of yourself every day in 2013 bo burnham created a series for mtv called zack stone is going to be famous it stars burnham as zack stone a recent high school grad who decides instead of going to college he's going to blow all his savings on a camera crew to make a reality show about himself zach is evil he's a bad man i hate that guy so much why he's not so bad i want to curb stomp him just you like that boom he'd be fine though i'm not violent he's constantly flying into violent rages and screaming and manipulating people and disrespecting all the people that love him he should be in prison so i'm at the gas station amy pick a dish classic me pretending to have an outburst i'm not i'm not furious and the reality show is an unimpressive imposition it's not the case of tortured genius it's not like jeff bezos who's complicatedly added so much value and utility to the world while also taking so much from it zack stone is untalented and problematic he against the will of everyone around him imposed these cameras into his life but his life is so pathetic that he's constantly telling them to cut constantly no cut all right cut cut please it's mom's stuff i'm sorry cut please all right cut ew cut cut please cut please oh my god cut cut zach can you put the camera down ah caught not cut mmm mmm here we go can you give us a minute cut i have two slices come on just oh all right go leave we cut cut cut did you just tell my camera to cut this little [ __ ] is hyper fixated on transforming his life into a performance in the quest of fame at the expense of everything sacred he spends the entire show wrecking loving relationships and embarrassing himself and ruining funerals and [ __ ] and then at the very end he almost learns his lesson see i always thought like this moment would be like the most important moment in my life but i'm here and she's somewhere else and that's all i can think about and i'm in love with her someone tell her that zach stone doesn't need to be famous sax stone just needs to be amazed but paradoxically ironically and horrifyingly his vulnerable confession of love on live tv and subsequent decision to quit his quest for fame turns out to be the thing that finally resonates with an are you two audience now you guys look so cute together he has fans now and it immediately goes to his shitty head can i have your autograph sure yeah zach stone it's gonna be baby we watched the woman that loved and supported him throughout his selfish ambition and then rejoiced in his self-actualization slowly realized the implications of this then cut to black that's the end of the show it's really dark real intimate life as performance is what resonates with audiences zack stone is gonna be famous and we're all zac stone what he did to his life is just an exaggeration of the subtler insidious performance that we're all slowly being boiled in while burnham was touring make happy and doing that monologue about performance anxiety no one his age seemed to relate to it which makes sense because he's a famous person that performs for a living and most people are not that if you can live your life without an audience you should do it but unexpectedly and perplexingly 13 year olds related they knew exactly what he was talking about i would perform my show and i would meet kids after and you know young girls would come up to me and they understood what i was expressing in that bit and on stage way more than guys my own age you see beau was a very early and rare specimen of someone crafted by and steeped in the internet he was literally one of the first viral people ever he felt the emotional infrastructure of social media as it was built but 13 year olds in the 2010s were born inside of it and the discourse surrounding it is ending at the cinnamon challenge and fake news spooky no one's talking about how it's affecting their souls and their emotional lives and how they perceive themselves except for beau burnham are first through the door i misunderstood his now i'm going to make appoint moments he wasn't just some internet famous dude with performance anxiety he was patient zero part 10 eviscerating inside might as well inside is a musical comedy that tries to make a point there are the joke songs and then the serious bits the whole ending half obviously is about these bigger ideas we've been discussing but the first half has some straight ahead comedy songs such as face time with my mom a song about the frustration and trying to communicate fluidly with loved ones from an older generation who can't quite grasp the nuances of the modern technology through which we now enact intimate relationships or white women's instagram a song about the idyllic simulation of affluent social media savvy women that they cultivate online turning their entire life into a needlessly curated performance including their mourning of their deceased parents or sexting a song about the vulnerability of sex and how the anxiety and self-consciousness involved in it is exacerbated by the reductive medium of texting wherein it concludes with the narrator's phone dying directly after he sends a dick pic he's insecure about his access to the feedback is cut off and then it's just him alone with himself a vulnerable piece of him in the cybernetic ether the anxiety and inhumanity of it all setting in it's the mediums it's the mediums inside is actually a film expressly about capitalist trans human infrastructure invading the most intimate cavities of our hearts and minds and i didn't realize that until the second viewing the jeff bezos song is just one of a thousand components expressing panic and anxiety resulting from overwhelming dominance of mediums that want to extract as much money from humanity as possible regardless of actual value provided the intermission is literally him cleaning the fourth wall in the opening song burnham catches us up on some things covet happened he's stuck in his room he figured while he's there he might as well make something it seems that after several years out of the spotlight and regaining some mental fortitude he decided to start up his meticulous creative process of constructing a stand-up special for us once again right before the pandemic hit i'm sorry i was gone but look i made you some content so creatively circumventing the limitations of kovid he combined his music film lighting and comedy experience to create something unique streamed directly to our phones and tablets content the pandemic necessitated we all learn how to enjoy a social life and enjoy entertainment from the comfort of our homes in the loving embrace of our screens it really is a beautiful day to stay inside [Music] after our overture we're treated to a behind-the-scenes montage of burnham testing the cameras and lights he'll use to make the special set to a gentle sparse rendition of welcome to the internet as the audience we're already behind the veil and we haven't even seen the thing the sequence ends with the frame slowly being swallowed by a pitch-black camera lens the red light is on it's recording we're being watched we're looking with our eye cameras at our tv screen and that screen is showing a lens watching us back as we fall into each other until everything is black performer and audience swallowing each other several times directly after experiencing a polished music video we cut to burnham arduously quality checking what we just watched in the mundane light of his laptop screen staring at something you know others will stare at trying to edit with consideration as to how they will perceive it knowing you put yourself on camera edited yourself and now you're staring yourself through a laptop screen to package yourself as part of a piece of media that will be seen by millions through other laptop screens wondering if it's funny wondering how people will perceive it in context with the rest of your career wondering if someone will make a video essay about it the atomization of self-perception is never made more literal than when he reacts to himself reacting to himself reacting to himself reacting to a 34-second song he made about interns i want this to stop okay i want this to stop the song sexting ends with a bridge that is arguably not about sexting at all another night on my own here stuck in my home yeah sitting alone one hand on my dick and one hand on my phone frequently synthetic lights and projections are accompanied by nature sounds blurring the lines between the natural world and simulations of it in regards to welcome to the internet do i have to say anything it's this essay in five minutes in how the world works sako espouses rapid fire leftist talking points about how corrupt capitalism and the system is and he's very welcome to do so the fbi killed martin luther king private property he's never silenced and in fact is encouraged to keep proliferating his politics until he questions the medium through which he is having the conversation the medium in this case him being a sock puppet being burnham himself but that's what have you not been [ __ ] listening we are all right wait wait no please don't want to go back are you gonna behave yourself yes yes what that's so dark it's almost not funny but it is funny inside is funny the bezos song makes me giggle it is significant that the first two songs are titled content and comedy hopefully it's blindingly obvious at this point why burnham feels weird about the word content thank you for watching my content the word reduces all media and art and creativity online into a set of engagement data that the algorithm can read better and recommend better regardless of its purpose or meaning music video content video essay content vlog content political discourse content social commentary content gaming content content content content content content it's the homogenization of everything regardless of the type of value it provides into one currency for the benefit of massive corporations you know like money the second song of the special is comedy burnham has expressed conflicted feelings about the medium of comedy for a very long time evolutionarily why is stand up what it is like what is it doing is it a way is it like a way for us to progress emotionally but don't get it twisted a lot of is on stage pain that he expresses is still performance it's not like he's in a constant state of suffering forcing himself to create jokes for the masses against his will he likes comedy obviously what's much more dubious is whether or not comedy is something that our souls need right now should i be joking at a time like this i was taking out with a friend recently and their younger sibling had friends over in their backyard and so i was around a gaggle of 15 year olds at one point one of the kids sat down kind of weird and then one of their friends chirped them saying you could sit down normally if you had the peak mail form that kid was referencing the ideal make body meme a meme about posting strange images with the caption this is the ideal make body you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like this meme is a reference to a steven crowder tweet with a typo in it the meme is funny because it's borrowing the supposedly badass speaking truth to power tone of the original post and putting it in an absurd context crowder's inflammatory defensive reaction against inclusivity in body positivity movements is decontextualized and then teenagers putting that quote over a picture of shrek is stupid and funny coupled with the ineptitude implied by the typo it just tastes good in the brain to use ironically i ain't even know that that meme was a reference to a steven crowder tweet until i couldn't stop thinking about how effortlessly this 15 year old referenced it that kid probably also doesn't even know who crowder is but she intuitively and effortlessly is referencing the lineage of male dominance in society and then feminism and inclusivity movements reacting to that and then men reacting to those movements defensively by asserting the sanctity of manhood and this [ __ ] your feelings snowflakes kind of tone and then the internet perverting that into complete ironic nonsense a condensation of that very real history and act of debate into a joke memes are really funny and stimulating partially because they can communicate so much cultural and emotional information in a second one of my favorite pastimes is critically analyzing memes there's so much happening underneath the hood so much that you would have to explain to someone with no internet savvy context to even get what's happening like what the [ __ ] is this it requires so much knowledge of internet history and tone to even compute the genre of deep fried sacrilegious post-ironic boomer memes reads like a collective expression of our craving for stimulation and connection it's like we're digging for the center of the earth searching for the core what's at the bottom is it irony is it sincerity where the [ __ ] is it is there a bottom anyone who's literate enough in memes to laugh at something as abstract as this will also tell you readily what constitutes a meme is not clear at all anymore when it was stuff like advice animals and rage comics and i can has cheeseburger cats the rules and the utility of memes were quite clear now anything can be a meme and everything is a meme the most abstract existential emotions and complicated social realities can be condensed into the meme format easily like even though these memes are formatted and to be interpreted tonally as jokes they're barely jokes at all these modern memes contain the kind of psychological setup and punch line that is satisfying to understand but it's hard to really say they're jokes and although we tend to think of internet memes as images memes are not limited to being pictures at all anymore memes are sentences or ideologies that can be repeated or mocked or bastardized memes can be videos and conventions and behaviors feelings can be memes literally anything can be expressed in the format of a meme so why is that and what does it mean no matter what meme you're looking at there is always a pseudo setup and punch line a reference to reality and then a punchy statement about it no matter how abstract the setup and punch line are they are always there whether or not it's funny the punch line tends to give our brain a little kick it feels good to read there's laughter or recognition or just a satisfying rush of understanding when you get that little serotonin boost you engage with it through the medium or save it and share it with your friends memes are communal they're meant to be shared when i laugh at this and i send it to my friends we're all looking at our screens longer yet again we're compressing ever increasingly abstract parts of our souls into jokes and then sharing them with each other and ending the conversation at laughter and i'm not saying it's somehow bad to laugh at jokes but it's not just jokes memes are not just jokes we use them very seriously it's how we're heard through the internet it's how we get the maximum amount of reach it's how you make a point and enact change it's not just jokes we're having serious discussions via memes how are you supposed to cultivate empathy with someone you disagree with via memes how do you gain a nuanced understanding of anything via memes the social dilemma tries to end on the point of fake news being the main threat emerging from social media we all know that famous statistic about fake stories being retweeted 70 more than real stories and having 100 times the reach but why is that the best explanation the researchers could limply offer is that the fake stories are probably more surprising of course they are they're better memes they are not bound to the tiring chore of being honest so they can be designed to please our lizard brains better they're customer obsessed any meme is neurochemically more exciting when it validates your pre-existing beliefs and makes whoever you already disagree with the butt of the joke this comedic power posturing is how we do our politics now politics the act of governing ourselves deciding what to do what is truth what is right via memes the joking and the performing and the power posturing is the only constant across a ridiculously divided political spectrum it's reductive it's playing games with our brains it's robbing us of long-form discussion it's increasing polarization and because of recommendation holes because that's more profitable what are you talking about having a national conversation by throwing fortune cookies at each other of course this stuff is reductive it's literally reductive it's 160 characters whatever your political leaning your saco on the hand of a system outside of your control say whatever the [ __ ] you want as long as you say it online as inside reaches its apex it sheds any pretense of comedy yet for the most part burnham sticks to his love it if you made it guns of evoking despair via description welcome to the internet and that funny feeling are mostly constructed of just listing off things that we recognize our guttural emotional reaction to these collages speak for themselves you're hyper-connected you're lonely you're overstimulated you're numb you know and to do a portrayal of the internet for me that was descriptive and not uh pedagogical there's a good college word for you um the climax of inside is the song all eyes on me which seems to be the most popular song from the show it's a song written from two clear perspectives simultaneously the first perspective is from a disembodied narrator encouraging humanity to appreciate the memes and constant performance as we ascend into transhumanism [Music] the second is from the perspective of the audience telling bo burnham to get over his anxiety and stop overthinking so he can just keep making good content for us [Music] either way it's an existential party anthem telling us to stop worrying enjoy the performance bask in the glory of constant perception let go don't be scared don't be shy come on in the water's fine the thing about comedy in the digital age is it's not just how we discuss our souls and politics but it's also our escape from that as much as the internet and social media is this anxiety-inducing apparatus through which we enact relationships and politics it's also the place we go to try to forget about how intense and complicated those things have gone we want to laugh i want to laugh if you wake up in a house that's full of smoke don't panic call me and i'll tell you a joke yeah the medium is obviously tricking us in using us and changing us mentally but also it's kind of just great jokes it's a place to feel a little less alone it's anxiety-inducing and mind-altering but it's fun the source of your pain and the source of your relief are one and the same it can feel terrible the way the internet has violated the sanctity of yourself and probably the best way to distract yourself from that is by going on the internet and with the speed that everything is moving at now and the fact that no one seems in control of it why wouldn't you how long can you teach children that their planet is dying while also telling them they're naive and stupid for thinking that they could organize to change it until they give up and fall into a pit of irony [Music] we make infographics on how to end racism for instagram stories we make twitter is bad tweets when you decide that you're too reliant on social media and you need to back away from it for your emotional well-being the first thing you do is announce that on social media what do you think is gonna happen if you don't announce it with a post if you just left social media maybe one of your friends think that you're ignoring them for a sec until they figure it out or text you how how long would it last then how long does it take after you quit social media for you to eventually just come back again maybe this time i'll have a healthy relationship with it our individualism isn't prevailing over the medium because our discussion about the medium is happening on the [ __ ] medium [Music] the final song in inside is goodbye it's a farewell song to humanity [Music] self-consciousness constant performance and cyborgian transhumanism is eating us alive the corporations that control the mediums only care about profit the parents still don't fully understand what a dab is and the kids are so lost and irony and despair that they can only meme the pain away in this song burnham appears to throw in the towel and give up trying to fix it all i promise to never go outside again after a couple verses and choruses this finale song launches into a medley of some songs previously played throughout the special which is dangerous compositional territory in my opinion when a show ends with a medley of songs from the show it can be a breeding ground for annoying unmotivated pantomiming of cohesiveness with no thematic meaning but burnham is very deliberate about which four songs come back and from what perspective they're recontextualized first the harmony and melody of all eyes on me frame burn himself doubt in what he's even trying to accomplish with this project or his career am i going crazy would i even know am i right back where i started 14 years ago then he pivots to welcome to the internet admitting now that he's no different from the transhuman children he's trying to protect i swear to god that all i've ever wanted was a little bit of everything all of the time he's complicit in the process for all his supposedly self-aware grandstanding he's just been a cog in the machine since he was 16. he did youtube he did vine his knees buckled under the weight of the internet as fast as any four-year-old given an ipad after five years of moralizing in interviews and avoiding comedy in social media he's back isn't he you're always back aren't you the floor is only tilting at a steeper angle every year kovet was just a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the process that was already occurring things that children already understood about the internet are finally sinking in for adults you might never have to go into work again cause we found out we can do it on zoom bo burnham found out he could do a stand-up special completely alone in one room playing and i'm staying inside i mean now that we have jokes do we really want to go back to boring patient vulnerable discussion then in the penultimate moment of this special we get the reprise of comedy in the context of the original song very early in the special wherein bo burnham points out that he's white four times it's mostly a mockery of his position in society as an entertainer when incredibly important things are going on his only ability seems to be distracting people from the chaos these lines demonstrate his apprehension towards throwing more irony and comedy into an inferno that's already constructed entirely of irony and comedy should i be joking at a time like this however in these final moments of the project he reframes himself as the audience in us as the performer if i wake up in a house that's full of smoke i'll panic so call me up and tell me a joke for all his self-reflection and philosophizing and impassioned opinions about the performer audience divide burnham is as helpless and afraid within what's happening as us he needs relief too oh [ __ ] you're really joking at a time like this and he depicts what this does to him emotionally very clearly he strips naked and burns a spotlight on himself at first he squints at the intensity surprised all this happening without him noticing it was happening then he hangs his head in subjected acceptance after this final goodbye and a full show inside this tiny room he finally tries to go outside the special is over it's time to stop performing so he tries but outside he just finds a sound stage where there's nothing but more lights in another audience outside is gone it's all inside and you can't get back inside yourself then it's revealed that even that moment of pure existential horror is a projection on a wall and burnham is watching himself yet another metal layer outside of himself the final shot of the film is burnham smirking along with us [ __ ] i can't save the world can i [Applause] it is kind of funny [Applause] inside isn't sad because kovid make man sad it's sad because beau gave up fine i like bo burnham okay i said it part 11 wait but i don't want to kill myself me neither but i don't know i got a good noggin on me but i'm only 23. i just wanted to make a silly video about the one-minute jeff bezos song and i accidentally read this man's soul for filth i thought bo burnham wasn't that deep and he beat me the self-professed purpose of burnham's work in rhetoric is to profound the groundwork for genuine discussion concerning the internet to attempt to acknowledge the spiritual and emotional dimensions of this thing in addition to just the superficial economic ones it's way too much commentary not enough description there's we haven't even gathered the raw materials to have a conversation about it we're just going to kind of describe our feelings and maybe give raw material for a conversation to be had i i only try to be like uh diagnostic not the word that means solving the disease the emergent issue with this is being descriptive and emotionally honest about his personal anxiety results in a product that is cynical as [ __ ] when you have to put suicide prevention resources in the credits of your movie it's a pretty good sign you have gotten lost in the hopelessness sauce and as burnham has put himself it's not useful to tear something down if you don't have something to provide in its place in a 2018 eighth grade interview at depaul university where he rants aggressively and tangentially on these topics as i have just done the session ends with an audience q a some of the young film students ask about eighth grade or film but most of them are responding to his discussion of the internet as a spiritual experience because kids get it you don't have to articulate it perfectly they know it in their bones and tummies and i think there's a sort of personal tummy sort of way that the internet plays out that i wanted to talk about which is just a more indescribable thing if i could describe it i would have written an essay my favorite part of this video is when this absolute icon arrives on the mic this incredibly earnest and vivacious young woman is just the peak leftist college student the whole gag of it is that neoliberal capitalism has made us into a culture that like you are in college although i suspect if i asked this lady what her favorite beatles album is she'd tell me how john lennon is problematic she's also everything i love about young leftists passionate and urgent and itching to define the problem and do something about it now at all costs and that's exactly what she does she asks the question you're clearly somebody who's thought about this a lot oh my question is how do you suppose we make this better so what then after all this passionate pertinent pontification does beau actually have to say about fixing things i don't i i don't know um he's got absolutely nothing i think eventually it will work out i don't know if it will truly i don't he completely blinks i i i don't know i i i just feel like this is the conversation these are the questions that i um haven't heard people say and i can't solve it monologuing you know it's just hopefully a conversation so what do you think all he really has is crippling anxiety talent and maybe a million dollars burnham isn't an economist or a politician he's an artist his job is to self-express and speak to our souls not necessarily fix everything on a pragmatic level jordan peterson has a good line about the role of artists in society the artists are the people who first articulate the unknown and so the role of artists in a healthy culture is to bring to public awareness elements of being that have not yet entered the the collective consciousness directly after that quote he says a bunch of stuff that i completely disagree with but i think it's funny to take him out of context to make it look like we're more in sync than we are burnham is only trying to provide the raw materials for meaningful discussion he fully acknowledges his limitation in actually solving the problem for actual guidance in shaping the future he looks to us i defer to you guys more i mean what i'm like i defer to you know it better than i do you're within it as us cyborg transhuman internet literate souls age into positions of power and parenthood and education it's completely on us to have the actual talk not the russia candy crush one the actual one we have to do the weird complicated work of making the meme the balance take i am seven years younger than burnham i was raised extremely online i have been creating and performing for the vacuous internet before i had an audience so i think i'm qualified to do a little prescriptive work and i'm not gonna be left-wing or right-wing or any wing i will be a wingless creature incapable of flight this is my stab at bipartisan inescapable truth i think the polarized culture war is incentivized by the medium through which we're having our political discussion and it's completely devoid of value despite how profitable and addictive it is if we can defeat it we can save the world and then secondly i'm gonna talk about the sanctity of your soul simple enough got it kill all normies is a book by angela nagle which analyzes the internet culture war and how it's grown to define our politics it's a deeply refreshing read the same way that burnham's emotional portrayal of the internet is refreshing it fills you with this overwhelming sense of thank [ __ ] someone is saying this we already know it in our stomachs why don't we even have the words to discuss it why are we just buckling under the weight of the medium and just becoming ever more angry and anxious with full knowledge that it's the internet's fault we make memes about it kill all normies chronicles the personalities of tumblr and 4chan in one cultural corner of the internet tumblr grew into the ultimate safe space the main preoccupation of this new culture the right names them sjws and snowflakes let's call it tumblr liberalism was gender fluidity in providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill health physical disability race cultural identity and intersectionality the now standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalization and depressions while the roots of this whole political sensibility may be found in academia and activist culture its emergence into the mainstream that led to hillary using terms like check your privilege and the intersectionality was the culmination of years of online development on tumblr and fan cultures on previous platforms like livejournal and on a mixture of social media the term woke is a word that the black community created that had a lot of cultural meaning that was quite specific and useful but like everything black people have given culture and art we have now bastardized it beyond all of its origins so we know what this is as woke culture we are also now universally very familiar with the dark side of this woke culture where what seems to be a mission of empathy turns into a pompous competition to be the most respectful and the most oppressed what seems from the onset to be a genuine attempt to be more open and more inclusive can quickly slide into a popularity contest and wide scale bullying virtue signaling is the phrase that was created to describe this process where someone would just start rattling off buzzwords and being incredibly condescending as a sort of power play with their virtue against yours it stops being about kindness and acceptance and just turns into a new way to be an [ __ ] this is a very real culture that is addictive to partaking you can start to feel powerful and define your identity in very specific terms and be angry with people who don't respect you as much as you respect them you unlock the ability to blame all sorts of [ __ ] on white men whether or not it's helpful or if they actually cause the problem this sense of community and urgency and righteous anger taps into primal emotions of power and belonging so that's growing on tumblr then way on the other side of the internet there's 4chan 4chan namely the wild west of the bee form is defined by its chaos this culture of anonymity fostered an environment where the users went to air their darkest thought weird pornography in jokes nerdish argo gory images suicidal murderous and incestuous thoughts racism and misogyny were characteristic of the environment created by this strange virtual experiment but it was mostly funny memes in a word transgression now it's hard to remember this in the current climate but transgression is not something historically associated with conservatism somewhere in the distant past conservatism meant family values tradition and decorum the crazy leftist guys were the ones out there doing full titty-out marches for feminism the leftists were the transgressors and the conservatives were slow and methodical and polite but as a reaction to the hyper puritan culture of online leftism the other side seized transgressive culture for themselves it wasn't cool anymore for tumblr to offend people but it was super cool for 4chan users to say the n-word specifically because you weren't allowed to do it anywhere else so while tumblr grew a toxic oppressive law of tolerance and virtue 4chan fostered freedom at all costs where indulging the taboo with a veil of ambiguous irony was celebrated now adults watching this might not understand what tumblr and 4chan is or how they work but i guarantee every single person watching this understands that this is the state of politics right now the new left and right has nothing to do with policy it's virtue signaling versus offensive freedom do you want to dunk on the woke people or dunk on the bigots that's not politics this war doesn't even allow us to get to economics or ethics or policy it's just appearances feelings fears insecurity it's performance addictive profitable polarizing non-stop performance the left-leaning people are performing wokeness and virtue and disgust with the deplorables and the right-leaning people are performing freedom and irreverence and ironic mockery of snowflakes who care way too much tell me that doesn't describe global political discourse way more than anything about economics donald trump fans constantly state plainly they love him because he pisses off woke [ __ ] and the establishment of censorship happy snowflake sjws we're having a good time i'm having a good time he's not talented he's not principled he can barely talk he can't even think he just repeats stuff he hears on tv verbatim we've seen a million times over if you just leave him in a room with someone long enough he just starts saying stuff to make them like him he's been in the public eye for a long time so we can actually see that he only got as combative and petulant as we now know him to be when he realized that he had an endless attention source from this new irreverent right-wing culture i don't know if he knew him in the old days i knew him before he had yeah we know him he didn't used to be quite as insecure quite as cranky quite as quite looking for a fight all the time that's his addiction talking he won that election because he's a directionless empty shell that just wants to perform and be silly and be seen i don't think this dude is funny i don't like potty humor that's probably part of it i like me some abstract intellectual stupidity but because this guy is so devoid of conviction or intention i don't find him entertaining in the slightest i could never call trump racist because it would require enough self-awareness and character to actually believe something the only interesting thing about him is just what he represents that this constant meme speak and performative offense is what people wanted he dominated the election cycle because he was more addictive and shareable than anybody else he wasn't boring he increased memes he increased engagement in advertiser revenue he is the medium of reductive internet discourse personified he's non-stop irreverence and pride for people who thrive on that and he's non-stop offense to puritanical woke people who want to feel ethically superior i don't hate this guy i don't dislike him i feel no feelings about him it's a it's a child it's an inept child he's truly not that interesting he lacks any enduring innate qualities of note except for what it means about us culturally that we're okay with this he'll be dead in the next few decades but the internet and our modes of discussion aren't going anywhere when the medium of discussion becomes reductive jokes a walking joke will be our leader the issue isn't individuals it's mediums that's the problem it's probably not the people you mean that that's the problem it's people thinking it's people versus people and it's mediums i was deeply upset when i heard joe biden say will you shut up man during the debate justice radical left what are you sure i get it i get the frustration it's sad that presidential debates have been proven winnable via schoolyard bullying and jokes but that will you shut up man was immediately a meme it was a dopamine hit for millions that wanted to see trump get dunked on and that's not how you defeat this bastardization of communication if you're worried about what donald trump does for our level of discourse don't stoop to his level of memes the opposite of donald trump rhetoric isn't donald trump rhetoric but left-leaning it's long-form sincerity the antidote for him isn't better tweets it's long-form conversation right i want to emphasize although you can probably guess my political leanings by looking at me for a sec this is a bipartisan issue i know even people who really like trump also know that trump stands more for memes and sensations than he does your actual values i'm involved in churches and have all sorts of friends that believe all sorts of things i've heard so many people articulate some version of he's an [ __ ] but at least he fights back against this wokeness or fights back against these policies i have found the new right-wing culture to be very sourced in fear and defensiveness to be clear that's not a dig that's a good thing that means you care about something you want to protect something i understand being passionate about beauty and wanting things to be good we can agree on that maybe so maybe could we have a conversation about having a conversation even that maybe is that okay you know my desire isn't to destroy things you love i think it's beautiful when people sincerely care about things i really care about the things i believe and i have faith that you care about the things that you believe so if we both care so much why are we having this discussion through this avatar of apathy i don't want to have society shifting existential conversations in 140 characters i don't want to do it in jokes i don't want to do it via memes i take this very seriously i trust you do too insofar as i have to pick a side in the culture war i felt heavily towards the tumbler-sourced leftist neo-woke culture i empathize more with people who care too much in the wrong way than i do with people that brag about how little they care as a shield from their tacit reinforcement of a status quo from which they happen to gain although woke verbage might not always be the most helpful thing we could be using when history shows so much richness and whiteness dominating oppressively and maliciously i do end up more inclined to listen to voices that are not rich and white i'm sorry if that offends you maybe these non-rich non-white voices are over correcting and don't have the best ideas maybe it's their turn to have bad ideas you've been having them all for the last few hundred years i hope that privileged or fortunate people are brave enough to acknowledge that they're fine and they won't die by letting these historically disenfranchised voices over correct for a second but me picking a side in the culture war at all is just me reading the terrain and trying to do the best i can in a situation i find flawed from the onset social media makes more money when we fight more and it makes way more money when we religiously reduce complicated concepts to shareable jokes and glib power posturing it's using pavlovian conditioning and addictive negativity to recommend horus into hating each other let's do a case study man and human pencil ben shapiro is a massive figurehead in the online conservative community he's also notably distance himself from the peak irony alt-right because he's jewish and those guys got really anti-semitic really quickly i award you 16 anti-racism points and i take back 10 for saying rap isn't music his jewish faith gives me something to hold on to in a vortex of things that i can't empathize with about him he has a basis of spirituality that i as a christian can connect to on a fundamental level i don't like ben shapiro dunking on people compilation videos because i think they're low brow and obnoxious and reductive and mean he seems to work very hard at reducing giant existential issues into one-liner conversation enders i think the result of those efforts is a rhetoric that hurts people it's designed to hurt in extremely retweetable fashion i don't think it's an honest conversation i don't think it's a real demonstration of intelligence i think his business model is turning serious conversations into a battle of memes don't get me wrong late night talk show hosts are also doing this diligently but when your primary claim to fame is dunking on random college students in a format wherein you clearly hold the social power and the only requirement for your success is you looking cool and being witty while making the other person look weak and silly i do not respect you as an intellectual leader you're just a fancy bully who cares more about your performance of superiority than educating why do all your sentences have to end with laughter from an audience why does that feel like victory to you but this lingering underlying commitment to spirituality gives me this hope for the sincerity of this person i generally don't respect the craft of a lawnmower just started outside the limits of mediums in shapiro's 2021 conversation with russell brand whom i seem to resemble in politics and vernacular the discussion opens with a heavy focus on spirituality this is a strategic decision that bran makes to ground the conversation between these two opposing perspectives in commonality shapiro is spiritual brand is spiritual why don't we start there instead of hitting him with a pro-trans meme which will activate all his many rehearsed anti-trans memes and then it's just a fight of who's got the best memes a fight that i remind you would have probably gone viral instead the conversation is intricate and human and it inspired empathy in me for this man that i've only seen the worst of at one point during the talk shapiro talks about how intense twitter can be for someone who lives a public life twitter used to be on my phone i remove twitter from my phone because really for for people in public life twitter is sort of an ego machine because it's not just that you're tweeting things out into the ether you're always constantly checking your messaging your your incoming messages and and how people are responding to you and creates a real sort of echo chamber of people who are talking about you all the time which is the most unhealthy thing you can have but in accordance with this judaism he explains how once a week on the sabbath he turns off his phone completely and reconnects with god and his family and his place in the universe sabbath is a big deal being able to physically turn off all electronic devices and not be connected at all to the news starting friday night ending saturday night is a huge thing it's kind of a wonderful way to reconnect with family it's a way to reconnect with religion you go to synagogue for a couple of hours you spend some time contemplating your place in the universe and and contemplating what you think god requires of you and in that moment my heart lurched towards ben shapiro's i'm so glad that this person for whom so much of his life revolves around debate where people who disagree with him are his enemies he must constantly be ready to outwit i'm so glad he has this sacred moment built into his week and it leaves me so curious as to why that sanctity doesn't bleed into his rhetoric shapiro is most famous for his anti-trans anti-leftism at-large debates wherein he achieves stunning victories over the fierce opponents of teenagers and 20 year olds the tone of it all is so cleanly embodied in his iconic catchphrase facts don't care about your feelings very individualistic very spicy very memeable very good there's no point whining about your feelings if you can't back up your political and cultural stances with facts but shapiro also clearly cares about the soul i care about my soul too don't you care about my soul my feelings may inconvenience you they may require patience they may require you listening and learning about me and maybe after all that listening and learning and patience and kindness you will feel the exact same way philosophically and politically about everything but open empathetic dialogue is valuable admitting you might be wrong and you're doing your best is valuable giving someone else the space to be wrong without having to prove yourself right is valuable feelings are valuable facts don't care about your feelings but i am not a fact i care about your feelings no matter how hard i think about something i leave about 40 of my thoughts to be open to others experiences and know that i will never ever know others experiences so that my worldview has to be informed by other people's truths yeah that i that i will never know so if a whole group of people feel a certain way i believe them you know and i don't need it to completely add up logically in my mind sometimes you don't have all the answers and there i think that the best thing you can do and this is true in in most versions of everything is acknowledging when you don't know something that's what we're supposed to be doing here that's why we're into politics because we care about existential issues i don't like that ben shapiro memes and his viral dunking on trans socialists made me assume all sorts of things about what he's capable of spiritually and intellectually and i hate that before he's even met me he'll have his views on things that i identify with and believe in passionately shaped by memes flowing the opposite direction how can we even start to have genuine conversations when we're so inundated with jokes at each other's expense i don't want the belief to be that we can never understand each other the particulars of what shapiro is debating with anyone is less important than his ability to walk the conversation back to a reliable crowd-pleasing zinger that incites excitement and laughter a power performance that plays well as a meme online our biggest spokespeople at either end of the political spectrum use this technique the real enduring scary thing about donald trump is that he opened the gates for all political discourse to take the form of means and culture war by proving that it's more profitable even though it's less valuable and productive i used to work at a summer camp with children which was hard because i couldn't say [ __ ] there are a lot of different ways that adults react to children who are behaving inappropriately some people laugh when a kid swears or they get angry with a kid who's having a tantrum that's ridiculous you're allowing this interaction to become a stimulating game of cause and effect you're playing into the medium of childishness you're an adult the real method is to make what's happening uncomfortably sincere don't laugh don't get mad don't participate stop acting like this behavior is effective and meaningful look them in the eyes and ask why are you doing this why are you being disrespectful to me i don't think this is funny you don't yell back at a toddler you don't change minds and hearts with memes this is not how you debate this is not how you discuss i don't care where you land on the political spectrum we need to cling to long-form discussion being fluent in the internet as someone robs you of your ability to articulate long form climate disaster cancel culture racial discussions gender issues economics none of these things will get less divisive until the medium of discourse is rescued from polarization and mutual hatred the medium of the internet is not currently incentivizing us to do that it's profiting off the culture war they have a vested interest in not obviously interrogating the medium itself they own the mode of communication how do you criticize the internet on the internet and even that that means impossible and also what is called for on the internet is subtler longer form conversations we are not gaining value these few companies are profiting off the degradation of our souls and community while infighting and resentment gets ever more intense so presuming i've convinced you because my persuasion stat is ridiculously high how do you personally fight for your soul on a scale from one to zero are you happy cause you're on your own from here so are you happy my grandmother passed away earlier this year i really know her she's been bedridden and non-verbal for most of my life but she's gone now in the last three decades of her life she was dealing with rheumatoid arthritis um slowly getting sicker and her partner took care of her that partner's name is dave he's not my biological grandfather that man passed away a long time ago he married my grandmother after her first marriage and he stuck by her side as she got sick he personally shouldered the responsibility for her hospice care for years on years until she died this year after the funeral my mom took it upon herself to start regularly visiting dave getting to know this man who had invested so much time and love into our family he didn't have to stick around for it it was hard grueling small granular work with the human body i mean people people know i mean you guys know on one of her visits i decided to come with her um because might as well i mean he's the closest thing i have to a grandfather for context as to my mental state at the time i was really deep into research on this like right at the microchip in the brain part i was starting to crumble under the hopelessness of it all i was starting to hit that point of cynicism and apathy that ends with you just laughing at some memes and accepting the world is gonna burn the people in power will stay in power there's nothing you can do but laugh and exercise your little slice of individualism get famous on youtube and make your money what else can you really do it had me in a very negative spiritual space i was giving up on people at large i was losing a sense of constructive responsibility now you have to understand dave doesn't have a computer he doesn't have a wi-fi router or a mounted tv he has a cell phone with no contacts saved and a little piece of paper on his mantel with six people's phone numbers written down and their names beside it this dude is in his 70s and he lives a very simple life in a very little house so when we got there he turned off his am radio or whatever was playing and we just had to sit in the one room in the house there was to sit in and just talk my phone was dead of course because it sucks so there was no distractions no activity to do it was just dave my mom and me from three different generations spending long slow time together dave has this affectation where he'll stay silent and think for a long time before speaking you'll have this urge at first to fill the silence and and make it not awkward but eventually you realize like if you just stop talking and let him just sit there for a second he will eventually say something it's not awkward he's just okay taking a long time to think that was the pace of the conversation and i didn't know anything about his life so i asked a lot of questions and then sat for a really long time until he responded he did have a little tv so i asked him what he liked to watch what kind of movies he liked he said he only watches sports and a few soap opera reruns and he said he had not seen the movie since 1973. he said he saw one in 1973 he didn't like it and he was like i don't like these they just never again and something about that particular piece of information ricocheted around my mind and started this chain reaction that boiled into this overwhelming sensation tethered to the realization that nothing that i do is valuable to this guy no album i've created no live performance no tweet no live stream no script to any play movie or tv show no not even my fast-paced internet friendly way of comedically speaking works here my mom tried to explain to him at one point what i do on the internet for money and i was just like stop nothing that i am gifted with is valuable to this man none of my talents or passions have any effect here in this realm my magic doesn't work so i'm not here to give i must be here to receive so i listened and i learned a lot he's got a framed photo of him just shaking prince philip's hand that that was a story he has a certificate framed on his wall from the british government honoring him for 30 years of agricultural service and then to the right of that he has his grandfathers of the exact same kind i was overcome by the tangible weight of time this man had committed himself earnestly to his job my family and his life of simple pleasures i was in my head spiraling about transhumanism and trying to be a genius for the internet and good for me i'm so relevant so trendy so cutting edge but i couldn't shake the feeling there was something he knew that i didn't so i asked him i asked the question are you happy my mom scurried over to the bathroom because she was like whoa this is deep i want cj i want my child to experience this his response was you have to be it's not a life if you're not when your grandma passed that was a sad time but you have to be a man and make life worth it and then i said did you just misgender me you bigot i'm kidding i didn't say that experience entirely was unpostable if i had my phone on me i might have missed the whole thing it was an intimate plunge into values that are being systemically eroded in our souls it single-handedly saved me from despair i love the internet i love what it's brought into the world i think art right now is incredible because of the internet the internet has helped me create and maintain some of the most important relationships in my life and i think the jokes are hysterical and deep and incredibly clever but it's changing you even if you go to social media for relief and for pleasure and and you feel warmly towards it as you engage with the medium as your souls inside of it it's changing you this is your life the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life the amount of time you spend scrolling it's ruining your attention span it's ruining your empathy it's ruining your patience i'm sorry it is it's not up to you it's not allowing you to be alone with yourself it's robbing you of the ability to experience reality without instinctually compressing it into performance what i and many young adults my age are realizing i think is phone addiction isn't funny it's it's not a meme how how into the internet we are it's not a thing to make fun of children for it's serious and dissociative and disconnecting regularly or permanently from some platforms is unequivocally a good thing for you the u part in my research one of the most consistent and hilarious facts that came up repeatedly is that none of the people that work in big tech allow their children to use the product that they create we know this and so few people are discussing it meaningfully talking about the soul isn't a waste of time to anything except for ai designed to optimize profitability your ability to disconnect from the internet and live in your body is very valuable and every one of these platforms is really trying to convince your brain on a very deep primal level that it's not there is good and bad and all these things i'm trying to validate that the internet is is real and useful negotiating a healthier relationship with it has to be more nuanced the solution can't just be this individualistic like just stop using it it has to be systemic although i tend to be more sympathetic towards socialist solutions there are a lot of alternative unorthodox executions of capitalism that would also help douglas rushkoff andrew keane jaron lanier bo burnham any of these guys who talk about these things all have very nuanced stances on them the world is beautiful it's also [ __ ] up the dialectics i think it's good that we're memeing parasociality into a nuanced understanding of it i think it's good we're starting to flex ever so slightly away from the brink of cancelled culture into a desire for actual accountability there's something to be said for having faith in the cultural pendulum swing and the human spirit podcasts and video essays i realize with a small pang of pride are great examples of long-form discussion that's prevailing i'm not an economist i'm not a politician i'm not a leader of humanity yet i'm just an artist that wants to make the world more beautiful and expand our consciousnesses in a productive way i'm trying to follow what dave gave me and do what i can and and be happy and be be happy and this is what i can do i just want to walk the discussion one step further than burnham has with inside more raw materials to have the discussion it involves being honest and taking risks and i don't know maybe being wrong that's my offering to you and though it feels insufficient it's all i have to give my vocabulary my knowledge and because those aren't enough on their own a piece of my soul [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] i normally end these with a joke i think i'm an addict want the world and i'm gonna have it i'm so [ __ ] dramatic got all my bones up in the attic and i dance them all around like a marionette hey guys so that's the end of the video thank you so much for watching i really hope you liked it if you did make sure you like and subscribe leave a comment for that algorithm and don't forget to ring the bell so you never miss another upload of mine if you haven't already go ahead and check out the rest of my channel for more content like this and then if after you've seen all that and you still haven't had enough of me make sure you follow me on my socials to stay as up to date with me as possible you'll get all sorts of extra content and just see what i'm up to on the daily this video like all my videos is brought to you by my lovely patrons patreon is a platform that supports creators and helps us make the content that you want if you're a fan of my work please consider donating even just a couple dollars a month it goes a really long way and helps me really focus on this as a full-time gig as a patron you can get your names and the credits in my videos and access to all sorts of behind-the-scenes content that you won't get anywhere else i try to be honest with you guys and if i'm keeping it real working on these longer video essays can get pretty stressful but having my patreon backers and that reliable source of income really helps and every time i end up typing all your names in the outro my videos i feel like we're all working on something together on screen right now is the fan art of the video by atleila.reveal so make sure to go give her a follow thanks lila it looks great and now for the patreon question of the video shahirazad khan asks if you could have a meal with anyone living or dead what would the meal be and what kind of chair would you sit on um i think i would have a meal with someone dead the meal would be breakfast and my chair would be my own two legs i'd be standing [ __ ] you great question shahrazad thank you so much and finally i want to give a big big shout out to surf shark for sponsoring this video if you've been living under a rock or something and you don't already know surf shark is one of the best nord vpns out there so if you're ever looking to learn a new skill or build a website head to the description of this video and hit the link audible.com cjdx and you can get started right away with hundreds of champions from 14 playable factions i've already saved 50 on purchases just from the last month it's genuinely my favorite pair of headphones now i really recommend them so yeah thanks for watching to the end let me know in the comments what you want to see me do next no promises i can't do everything but i do read everything and i love hearing from you guys i guess that's it try to be nice to yourself i'll see you next time bye

Channel: CJ The X

Views: 1,467,462

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Id: UvYcunuF3Eo

Length: 146min 15sec (8775 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021