True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 191: Network
Aired: 2021-10-25
Duration: 01:19:59


=== Welcome to My Multiplicity (14:22) ===

[00:00:00]  My body is changing.
[00:00:02]  A thousand altars swim through me like a school of fish within the ocean.
[00:00:08]  Are we recording?
[00:00:10]  Yes.
[00:00:11]  Excellent.
[00:00:12]  I didn't ask if you and I were recording, Liz.
[00:00:15]  I asked if we were recording right now.
[00:00:18]  Yes.
[00:00:20]  Welcome.
[00:00:22]  My name is Brace, and I'm the host of the Alienware system.
[00:00:29]  Now, that isn't a podcast, but in fact, my multiplicity of plural identities.
[00:00:36]  See, I have self-diagnosed myself with DID, disassociative identity disorder, something I learned about on TikTok.
[00:00:44]  And I am inside.
[00:00:46]  In fact, they are inside me.
[00:00:49]  My altars.
[00:00:51]  The first who is actually fronting right now is Mortimer, a dwarf from the mines of Moria, which is in the universe of the Hobbit.
[00:01:02]  Recently asked to leave the mines after some unfounded accusations of untoward behavior.
[00:01:10]  Well, we're all dwarfs here.
[00:01:12]  Oh my God.
[00:01:13]  He has come to inhabit me to take a little break.
[00:01:19]  Now we have to make that noise.
[00:01:22]  The voodoo magician.
[00:01:23]  Oh, God.
[00:01:24]  Uh-huh.
[00:01:25]  Not an actual voodoo magician.
[00:01:27]  It's a name.
[00:01:28]  It's a British name, actually.
[00:01:30]  A boot black from 1800s England who has come to inhabit me and who I let take over my body when I'm feeling a little bit stressed by maybe Liz looking at me weird.
[00:01:42]  Elsewhere in me are a paraplegic 47-year-old former school teacher from Maine, Stephen King.
[00:01:51]  We also have within me a what's her name?
[00:01:57]  The hot lady we were talking about earlier.
[00:01:59]  She thinks she's short?
[00:02:01]  Oh, Emirata?
[00:02:02]  I also have within me Emily Radijowski, who is another altar I use when I'm feeling a little bit glamorous.
[00:02:11]  And today, dear listeners, I will be introducing you to all of these subjects and more over an extended five-hour live stream where I humiliate myself as Liz looks on in horror and then never speaks to me again.
[00:02:28]  Ladies, gentlemen, alters, welcome to Alienware.
[00:02:41]  Oh my god.
[00:02:58]  Would you, if I like showed up one day and I was like, listen, Mortimer's on right now, like he'll be chill, but just like, don't be weird.
[00:03:04]  Would you, you'd leave, right?
[00:03:06]  Or would you?
[00:03:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:07]  Before you said, would you, I was about to say I would turn around and walk away.
[00:03:11]  So like, if you showed up here today and I was like, Liz, just be cool, but like, I'm feeling like a little like stressed and anxious.
[00:03:19]  Strayest?
[00:03:20]  Strayest.
[00:03:21]  Well, that's what we call it.
[00:03:21]  That's in DID TikTok.
[00:03:23]  That's what we call it.
[00:03:24]  So I don't think that's funny for you to say that.
[00:03:26]  You would leave.
[00:03:28]  Yeah, I would probably like look over at Young Chomsky.
[00:03:31]  We'd give a nod and then I would on out of here.
[00:03:34]  I would hope you guys would 5150 me or something.
[00:03:37]  Jesus Christ.
[00:03:39]  Well, I guess that's only if you're suicidal.
[00:03:41]  Put me in some Bellevue.
[00:03:43]  That's a place where people go.
[00:03:44]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:44]  That's a local hand.
[00:03:45]  That's a local haunt.
[00:03:47]  Yeah.
[00:03:50]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:51]  Hi.
[00:03:52]  My name.
[00:03:53]  Oh, God.
[00:03:54]  Wait, hold on.
[00:03:55]  I do have alters.
[00:03:56]  My name is Rachel Jake, aka Brace Belden.
[00:04:00]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:00]  This entire podcast has been just a system of your altar.
[00:04:06]  They call this the Convergence.
[00:04:08]  What's your name?
[00:04:10]  I, my name is Liz.
[00:04:13]  And we are, of course, like I said, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:04:16]  The podcast is not Brace's alters, but Truanon.
[00:04:21]  Hello.
[00:04:22]  Hello.
[00:04:22]  And we will.
[00:04:23]  I am.
[00:04:24]  If you're like thinking, what, what are alters?
[00:04:26]  Why am I listening?
[00:04:27]  Oh, we'll talk about it.
[00:04:28]  We'll talk.
[00:04:29]  This is a lot of fake out.
[00:04:30]  We'll talk about.
[00:04:30]  We're talking about it.
[00:04:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:31]  No, that's literally what the episode is about.
[00:04:33]  Well, and some other things.
[00:04:35]  But I want to say hello and welcome back, everyone.
[00:04:39]  We took a little bit of a break accidentally.
[00:04:41]  First of all, we didn't, I want to be clear.
[00:04:43]  We didn't take a break.
[00:04:44]  We haven't been relaxing.
[00:04:45]  We've been doing our podcast.
[00:04:47]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:48]  We've been doing our live shows, the string of which has ended and never be seen again.
[00:04:55]  Yeah, we did.
[00:04:55]  For those of you who didn't come, we did a couple of live shows in New York and Philadelphia.
[00:05:01]  They were so fun.
[00:05:02]  Shout out to those who did come.
[00:05:04]  Thank you very much.
[00:05:05]  We really had a great time.
[00:05:07]  And we want to do it again soon.
[00:05:10]  So 2023, 2024, maybe.
[00:05:12]  Yeah.
[00:05:13]  We'll be back in the live spaces and avoiding a Boticlon style.
[00:05:20]  Oh, my God.
[00:05:21]  So, Liz, we've been gathered here today to talk about the freaking internet.
[00:05:28]  Yeah, the freaking internet.
[00:05:30]  So some microchip maiden named Frances Haugen.
[00:05:36]  Oh my God.
[00:05:36]  I was just laughing to myself, thinking, oh my God, I want Brace to say this name before I do.
[00:05:40]  Francis hogging all the damn.
[00:05:42]  I was.
[00:05:43]  Francis Hogan.
[00:05:45]  Hogan.
[00:05:46]  Listen, baby, any way you pronounce it, Hogan.
[00:05:49]  Some annoying fucking lady has been gabbing her damn ass off after leaking documents, which is fake friend behavior.
[00:05:57]  Now, if I was on the New York Post, by the way, Hogan's Heroes would have been great with her testimony.
[00:06:03]  She leaked to the Wall Street Journal a bunch of Facebook and Instagram's internal documents and then testified in front of Congress and now blah, blah, blah is like a whistleblower, blah, blah, blah.
[00:06:13]  You know what?
[00:06:14]  I don't know a whistleblower, I guess.
[00:06:16]  I'm going to say, God love a whistleblower.
[00:06:20]  Name me two that aren't annoying.
[00:06:22]  Well, I don't think just because someone calls themselves a whistleblower, that does not political content make.
[00:06:27]  No.
[00:06:28]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[00:06:28]  No.
[00:06:29]  And usually when you blow the whistle, whistle?
[00:06:32]  When you blow the whistle, shout out to the barrier on that one.
[00:06:36]  When you blow the whistle, thank you.
[00:06:40]  You know, it's because you want the company to do better.
[00:06:43]  Or because you want to assume that.
[00:06:44]  Because you believe in the company.
[00:06:45]  It's not like you're trying to smash anything or whatever.
[00:06:48]  It's because you're trying to reform the company from the inside.
[00:06:50]  Precisely what she says.
[00:06:52]  She's like, I believe in the mission of Facebook and Instagram.
[00:06:55]  Right.
[00:06:55]  God knows what mission that is.
[00:06:58]  Look, you got to be a sick, fucking twisted person if you believe in the mission of Facebook.
[00:07:02]  And you testify to that under oath.
[00:07:05]  You couldn't get me to testify that if you had a MG42 German World War II machine gun loaded and readied at me.
[00:07:15]  That'd be insane.
[00:07:17]  But yeah, we're not even going to like, we're not dwelling on this little bitty too much.
[00:07:22]  A lot of people are like, oh, you know, she's working for this or this or this or this.
[00:07:26]  I'll tell you this.
[00:07:28]  You don't even, I don't even care who she works for.
[00:07:30]  I'm sure she works for.
[00:07:31]  Well, she works for Facebook.
[00:07:32]  Well, no, but there's a whole thing like, oh, she works for the Deep State or whatever.
[00:07:35]  I got to tell you, she should be in prison.
[00:07:37]  Don't care.
[00:07:38]  Even if she didn't work for anyone, prison.
[00:07:40]  If you work for Facebook, you work for the Deep State.
[00:07:42]  You are in, I'm going to put you in prison.
[00:07:44]  But what she did show us, which was basically stuff that everyone could already assume, was a little interesting.
[00:07:50]  It's been interesting to see these kind of backlash for it.
[00:07:54]  So I want to talk a little bit about the usage that people use of technology.
[00:08:02]  That sentence was sort of experimental.
[00:08:05]  William Burrows.
[00:08:06]  One of the altars said that one.
[00:08:08]  Cut up sentence there.
[00:08:11]  But I read some statistics recently, which for me is very difficult to do, that were kind of shocking to me.
[00:08:20]  Mind-blowing.
[00:08:21]  The average daily amount of time spent online is now six hours and 59 minutes a day, which is just.
[00:08:29]  So that's basically like a workday.
[00:08:31]  Seven hours.
[00:08:31]  Yeah.
[00:08:32]  That's a workday.
[00:08:33]  Nearly.
[00:08:33]  And I think a lot of that has really, in fact, I think that uptick is due to the scandemic, but it is still pretty.
[00:08:42]  And, you know, you see it mirrored when we talk about teenage internet use, too, which we'll get to in a little bit.
[00:08:46]  But it's insane.
[00:08:48]  COVID-19 apparently has doubled people's usage of phones.
[00:08:51]  And now it feels like, I mean, this is a lot of thought.
[00:08:54]  Remember when we did those great reset episodes?
[00:08:57]  I do.
[00:08:57]  A long fucking time ago.
[00:08:59]  You just like, wow, I haven't thought about that in a minute.
[00:09:02]  Yeah.
[00:09:02]  Well, a lot of this, I think, is great reset type behavior.
[00:09:05]  It's now like, now it's cell phones, even more so than they were even two years ago, are inseparable from daily life.
[00:09:13]  Yeah, well, I think that that's also, yeah, this stuff kind of grows exponentially.
[00:09:17]  And so every year it gets its, you know, the growth of its use is bigger and bigger each year.
[00:09:22]  Exactly.
[00:09:23]  Like, even if you go to a restaurant now, even if there is a waiter.
[00:09:27]  Oh, the QR thing.
[00:09:28]  The QR thing, which I don't understand because their whole thing is.
[00:09:30]  You know what's so funny too?
[00:09:32]  Like they tried to make QR codes.
[00:09:35]  Okay, I'm getting real boomer, but they tried to make QR codes a thing.
[00:09:38]  Like, I don't know.
[00:09:39]  We're talking 2011, 2012.
[00:09:42]  I remember marketing, like for this company I worked for, Marketing Sex would always be like, whoa, let's see if we can work some like QR codes in the wild.
[00:09:48]  It's like a call to action.
[00:09:49]  Fucking marketeers love talking about a call to action.
[00:09:52]  Yeah.
[00:09:53]  Let's bring that one back.
[00:09:54]  They just pointed a gun and then pretended to shoot it at me.
[00:09:57]  Then they fell off because everyone was like, hey, I hate these.
[00:10:02]  What are these?
[00:10:02]  These are stupid.
[00:10:03]  This is for losers.
[00:10:04]  I'm not, I have no part of it.
[00:10:06]  Then Scam Demic, like you said, we all got, that's how they got us using them.
[00:10:10]  I got to say, I'm not being like making a joke like, oh, I'm so stupid.
[00:10:16]  I literally, I swear to God, I thought you needed an app to read QR codes.
[00:10:21]  Oh, me too.
[00:10:22]  Until you figured out that it's 21.
[00:10:24]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:24]  Insane.
[00:10:25]  It's so stupid.
[00:10:26]  But now it's like, even though it's like I'm still talking to a waiter and like kissing them on the cheek and shit because a French restaurant or whatever.
[00:10:34]  And menus can't spread COVID, but you still got to use a QR.
[00:10:39]  I don't understand it at all.
[00:10:40]  But basically, modern life is like unworkable without a cell phone.
[00:10:44]  You need it.
[00:10:44]  Like, it's everything from like to mitigate your anxiety in the same way that sort of cigarettes do where it doesn't actually do it.
[00:10:52]  It actually, you know, makes it a lot worse.
[00:10:54]  But to like even getting through the city for a lot of people.
[00:10:56]  And also getting paid.
[00:10:58]  Most people get paid.
[00:10:59]  And if you don't have a bank account, they get paid through different apps or, you know, whatever.
[00:11:03]  You've got Zelle, you've got Venmo, but like, you know, Cash App, so many people rely on transferring money to other people through these apps or through chat apps or whatever.
[00:11:10]  I mean, it's become, it is, there's no way of thinking of this technology outside of our lives or as an appendage.
[00:11:18]  It's very fully enmeshed in our daily social being.
[00:11:22]  100%.
[00:11:23]  In a way that like 10 years ago was so far.
[00:11:26]  I barely used a phone 10 years ago.
[00:11:28]  Yeah, it makes you miss a tiny phone.
[00:11:29]  Yeah.
[00:11:30]  And to me, it actually had a tiny phone.
[00:11:32]  Yeah, no, they were great.
[00:11:33]  Tiny.
[00:11:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:34]  Think couldn't do any of this.
[00:11:36]  Couldn't do anything with tiny flip phone.
[00:11:37]  Yeah.
[00:11:38]  Think about it.
[00:11:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:40]  But to me, like the most coherent sort of comparison that I've been thinking about a lot lately is cigarettes, right?
[00:11:45]  Because cigarettes, you know, bad for you, make you feel bad.
[00:11:49]  You think that they help your anxiety or make you feel good, but it's actually that you just feel worse when you're not.
[00:11:55]  Like you feel lower when you're not smoking them and then you feel slightly less bad when you do.
[00:12:00]  And they're highly addictive and make you, yeah, it's true.
[00:12:03]  I don't know if you've ever read Alan Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking, but I've read it several times and have not quit smoking.
[00:12:10]  But to me, it's like a very, it's a very apt comparison.
[00:12:13]  I'm thinking about a lot of what we're talking about in this episode with this stuff in mind.
[00:12:17]  Yeah.
[00:12:18]  So let's talk about it.
[00:12:19]  Let's talk about Instagram.
[00:12:21]  Yeah.
[00:12:21]  Frances Hogan.
[00:12:23]  So we said she leaked a bunch of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal.
[00:12:26]  And yeah, there was a big kerfluffle about this.
[00:12:28]  It was all over the news.
[00:12:29]  And basically, everyone's suspicions about these platforms, ourselves included, were confirmed.
[00:12:35]  100%.
[00:12:36]  This shit is bad for you.
[00:12:37]  Yeah.
[00:12:38]  And they know it.
[00:12:39]  Yeah.
[00:12:40]  And that's like, I mean, I'm sure that's not, you know, coming as a surprise to anybody.
[00:12:44]  Anybody, if you think about social media for two seconds, you're like, yeah, this is not good for you.
[00:12:49]  But it is interesting that they have sort of, in a way, quantified some of this stuff.
[00:12:54]  And the statistics here are like, you know, we can link to the actual documents they show.
[00:12:58]  Facebook, in fact, actually put them up with annotation.
[00:13:01]  I know.
[00:13:02]  The annotations are very funny.
[00:13:04]  Yeah.
[00:13:04]  It's like a little like debunker.
[00:13:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:07]  Except it's, you know, it's not really debunking it.
[00:13:10]  But there was some pretty surprising stuff.
[00:13:12]  Like teenagers are basically, Instagram relies on teenagers now spending three to four hours a day on the app, which I got to say, long time to be on Instagram.
[00:13:22]  And they were worried, they are worried about other apps eating into that time.
[00:13:26]  TikTok in particular, which is very popular among young people, and Snapchat, which never used.
[00:13:33]  I did when it first came out.
[00:13:35]  Yeah, I don't, I'm not, I actually don't.
[00:13:37]  We would, my friend and my coworker and I, we would like Snapchat each other like while we were in really boring meetings.
[00:13:43]  So we would get like funny stuff.
[00:13:44]  I don't know.
[00:13:44]  It's just like Instagram messages, but an app.
[00:13:47]  Yeah.
[00:13:47]  And it disappears forever.
[00:13:49]  But Snapchat, I think that was the novelty at the time.
[00:13:51]  And Instagram has since, of course, when they couldn't buy Snapchat, they then just absorbed all of its features, which is what typical companies do.
[00:13:58]  Well, that three to four hours a day is actually like basically double or triple what it was before the pandemic.
[00:14:03]  And Instagram now is very anxious to hold on to that time increase.
[00:14:07]  And, you know, they're very set on this teen market.
[00:14:09]  And it turns out they know their product is really bad for teenagers.
[00:14:14]  Yeah, it's led to like a huge increase in what, I mean, this is from their own documents and suicidal thoughts among teenagers.

=== TikTok's Toxic Influence (10:52) ===

[00:14:22]  I think like this is all stuff that we've like suspected, particularly with young girls.
[00:14:27]  And you saw like with the explosion of, you know, kind of like Tumblr communities and the early internet, like early 2.0 internet or whatever, like the, you know, you see kind of like an increase of eating disorders and that stuff kind of like, like, I don't know, even like memified into like kind of spreading around certain, certain groups.
[00:14:50]  But it seems like Instagram is really like making this worse for young girls.
[00:14:55]  Yeah.
[00:14:56]  I mean, one of their own slides in this little slideshow that they made says, we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.
[00:15:03]  Yeah.
[00:15:03]  And by the way, I think this stuff also is applicable to adults.
[00:15:06]  Absolutely too.
[00:15:08]  I think what's important then to understand is, or like really examine, is what is the innovation with Instagram that makes it kind of technologically like from a production standpoint so much different, right?
[00:15:22]  What is it about Instagram that is making, you know, making, like, you know, to quote them, body images worse for teen girls than other platforms.
[00:15:32]  Yeah.
[00:15:32]  And I think that's like really worth examining.
[00:15:34]  We've talked about that on this show, like my own feelings about why I think Instagram is like one of the most dangerous, although that was kind of before it seems TikTok took off, which we'll talk about in a second.
[00:15:44]  But there is something, again, about the mechanism of an image being shown back to you and kind of living in a world that you've curated that can be, I think, as we'll talk about, really, really have really, really adverse, you know, a lot of adverse effects.
[00:16:04]  Yeah, I think that like, I mean, we talked about this in relation basically almost to like men and women's maybe different experiences on Instagram.
[00:16:12]  Or at least my experience being probably very different than like a lot of women's experiences.
[00:16:18]  But like, cause I mostly just follow like, I mean, I have a private Instagram.
[00:16:22]  I, you know, I follow either people I know or, I don't know, like gun Instagrams and shit like that.
[00:16:29]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:30]  And although I do, I've lately started getting ads if I need, my sex drive is low and I need testosterone.
[00:16:38]  Oh, it's because you just had a birthday.
[00:16:40]  No, it's because you've moved into a different age box.
[00:16:44]  Well, no, I think I just keep, I keep looking at pictures of like really muscular, like oiled guys.
[00:16:50]  And I'm like, I wish I could inject something that made me look like this, which is ridiculous because they should also know that I order synthol, which whatever.
[00:16:58]  But yeah, I think that like, I think Instagram is really kind of insane in that way.
[00:17:03]  And like, to me, what's so crazy about this is that they like, they know, I mean, a fucking idiot could tell you that like, oh yeah, a bunch of like 13 year old girls looking at pictures of like Of contextless often, pictures of like women in these like really like kind of crazy outfits, very skinny, you know, oftentimes digitally manipulated.
[00:17:24]  Yeah, filtered to oblivion.
[00:17:26]  Exactly.
[00:17:26]  But it's not just other girls, they're looking at them themselves.
[00:17:30]  Yeah.
[00:17:30]  Right.
[00:17:31]  There's a mechanism there at work that I think, you know, we can get into some of the kind of like aspects of social media with this, but it's, you know, you're putting yourself into a machine and it's showing back a kind of perverted version of yourself to you, whether it's what you want to see about see of the world or whether it's like literally an image of yourself, like a selfie or whatever.
[00:17:57]  And it's, um, it's uncanny.
[00:18:00]  Like there's something wrong.
[00:18:02]  It's going to distort your total perception of yourself and others and the world.
[00:18:08]  And that is, yeah, it'll, it'll have some really detrimental effects.
[00:18:12]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:18:13]  And like, it's, I think, too, like, even the action of putting your own image, you know, even if you filter it or whatever on this same, and like seeing it in sort of the same format that you see the images of like, I don't know, a supermodel or whatever, or not even a supermodel, but like an influencer.
[00:18:31]  Like, and you're like, well, I'm fucking ugly, and I'm, but I'm appearing in the same box that I see this beautiful woman living this wonderful life in.
[00:18:39]  It's got to drive you a little nuts, especially if you're a kid and you don't know like that all of that is fake, that all of that is like done by teams of stylists and like it's not real.
[00:18:49]  Nothing on the internet is fucking real, you know?
[00:18:51]  That's got to drive you a little bit, a little bit insane there.
[00:18:54]  And like the other like studies that have been done about this stuff that not Facebook and Instagram have done, like actual like, you know, studies by like psychologists, you know, sociologists, all that stuff, shows that the problem is actually like way worse.
[00:19:07]  I would imagine.
[00:19:07]  Yeah.
[00:19:08]  There's like studies that show like 40% of Instagram users, or excuse me, this actually was a Facebook study.
[00:19:13]  40% of Instagram users who reported feeling unattractive said that that feeling started when they were using Instagram.
[00:19:20]  Like they could trace it back there, which is insane.
[00:19:24]  And it's not just like your own personal attractiveness in terms of like how you look.
[00:19:30]  I mean, that's a huge part of it for sure.
[00:19:32]  But also, depending on what you're looking at on Facebook, it's how you see your life in relation to other, like all aspects of your life.
[00:19:40]  Yeah.
[00:19:40]  You know, if that has to do with your kids or that has to do with your home or that has to do with your outfits or that has to do with your vacations or your ability to have any of those things, you know, that can completely distort your own sort of like the way that you view your own life in relation to those things.
[00:20:00]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:20:01]  And it's, it's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's funny because a lot of the sort of like discourse around this from lawmakers, from like, you know, op-ed writers, from any of this, involves some sort of like fail saves or like new features that Instagram or these platforms can add that'll mitigate this total bullshit.
[00:20:20]  Yeah, I mean, like we're trying to say, it's the mechanic, it's the actual like mechanics of the social production that occurs on these platforms that fuels this.
[00:20:30]  It's not, there's no tricks that you can like, there's no safeguards.
[00:20:34]  Like it is, I think as we'll get to, like what these platforms do in their own respects, but they do, and on whether on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, is what you're watching in real time and what is making you feel crazy is you're watching the circuit of capital happen at a really fucking quick speed.
[00:20:56]  You're watching yourself commodified in real time.
[00:21:00]  Yeah.
[00:21:00]  And it's fucking sickening.
[00:21:03]  It's what makes you feel crazy.
[00:21:04]  It's, yeah, absolutely there, 100%.
[00:21:08]  And like the fact that so much of this is now, I mean, Instagram had a huge marketing budget specifically towards like young teenagers.
[00:21:16]  I mean, that is like.
[00:21:17]  No, because they know.
[00:21:18]  They know.
[00:21:19]  They fucking know.
[00:21:19]  And they know that these people are obviously like, I mean, you and I and Young Chomsky all grew up in an era before of this, probably the last sort of generation.
[00:21:28]  We were just talking about that last night.
[00:21:30]  I feel very hashtag blessed to for what little time I had to experience.
[00:21:37]  I don't know what it would be like as a kid being like, whatever, digitally native or this stuff just being kind of the like, like we said, like there, it's not an appendage.
[00:21:48]  It is fully integrated in our lives.
[00:21:51]  This idea that it's somehow outside or separate or something is completely wrong.
[00:21:55]  Like this is just how you interact with the world now.
[00:21:58]  And I don't know how I feel about that.
[00:22:02]  Like I don't know exactly how I feel about that.
[00:22:05]  I'll tell you, I know exactly how I feel about that.
[00:22:07]  I think every single social media platform should be annihilated and their owners and many of the people who work at them should be arrested, imprisoned, or executed.
[00:22:19]  Absolutely.
[00:22:20]  These people are fucking poison salesmen.
[00:22:23]  And it's not even poison salesmen because you can go around your life.
[00:22:27]  You don't have to fucking have poison anytime.
[00:22:29]  This shit, you got to have this shit in order to do like half of the stuff that most people do day to day.
[00:22:34]  It's fucking absurd.
[00:22:35]  Well, the other thing I want to get to, speaking of poison, is this, oh, to cap this off too, check this out.
[00:22:41]  This comes basically at the same time that Instagram has announced that they're making an Instagram for preteens or for young teenagers to preteens.
[00:22:52]  Liz is not making a pleasant face.
[00:22:54]  I don't understand that because why?
[00:22:57]  What's they can't just have their own, they can't just be on Instagram is the whole idea.
[00:23:00]  It's like, oh, this is like a safer, younger Instagram.
[00:23:03]  I don't think so.
[00:23:03]  I mean, it's crazy reading a lot of these articles.
[00:23:06]  A lot of these kids, like, I started on Instagram at eight.
[00:23:08]  I'm like, dude, eight?
[00:23:10]  I don't even think I could, I couldn't even play fucking Yarn Chomsky.
[00:23:15]  What's the N64 game where it's like the Star Wars, Star Wars, Shadows of the Empire?
[00:23:21]  I couldn't even play that game when I was like eight years old.
[00:23:23]  I was too stupid.
[00:23:24]  I remember I couldn't get past the first mission because it was too much flying.
[00:23:27]  Yeah, but scrolling on a phone is a lot easier.
[00:23:29]  Yeah, yeah, even though I still struggle with that sometimes.
[00:23:31]  You know, I got two, two left thumbs.
[00:23:33]  Posable.
[00:23:34]  Exactly.
[00:23:34]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:35]  I'm still simian.
[00:23:37]  But, but that to me is like, I mean, again, and to see even like all these sort of people talking about like, oh, privacy or free speech, it's like, brother, you are arguing with the warden about the fucking about the terms of the prison, baby.
[00:23:51]  Like, I mean, it is, these things should be, they are, they are sick and they are bad.
[00:23:56]  Like, you can't make them good in any way.
[00:24:21]  And speaking of, we get to a platform that Liz is actually pretty freaking popular on, which is TikTok.
[00:24:29]  I don't have a TikTok.
[00:24:31]  You don't have a TikTok, but Liz lives in a TikTok house.
[00:24:34]  Yeah, I don't have a TikTok, but TikTok has me.
[00:24:37]  Exactly.
[00:24:37]  You do a lot of the dances.
[00:24:40]  And frankly, I'm a little sick of you hanging out with these young TikTok people instead of meal.
[00:24:45]  I want to say, Brace, you have been spending a lot of time on TikTok.
[00:24:50]  Yes.
[00:24:51]  I don't have a TikTok in the sense that I have a TikTok.
[00:24:54]  Yeah, you're not like.
[00:24:56]  I've never posted anything to TikTok.
[00:24:57]  I've never used it in any way that besides, I downloaded TikTok about a year ago to look at videos of people who are part of the ADBL adult or ABDL, adult baby diaper lover political tendency.

=== Multiple Personality Myths (03:09) ===

[00:25:15]  I'm calling it.
[00:25:16]  Yeah, okay.
[00:25:17]  Sexual fetish.
[00:25:19]  Because you're fascinated by that.
[00:25:21]  Yeah.
[00:25:21]  Oh, I'm into politics.
[00:25:23]  And, you know, I follow a few of their accounts.
[00:25:27]  I found some content which I would describe as weird on there.
[00:25:33]  And then didn't really use it very often until, well, actually, that's not true.
[00:25:38]  I also followed a, and these are people I've encountered in real life.
[00:25:42]  And so in very contentious situations.
[00:25:45]  And so seeing this sort of reflected on the screen too was pretty incredible for me to watch.
[00:25:50]  But I also follow a lot of DID or plural.
[00:25:55]  Okay, so now let's get to that.
[00:25:57]  Explain what this is.
[00:25:58]  So, okay.
[00:26:00]  I'm sure many of you people are familiar.
[00:26:02]  I'm sure many of you people are familiar with like multiple personality disorder.
[00:26:08]  Like the idea of multiple personalities.
[00:26:11]  I've heard of it.
[00:26:12]  And most people probably have, including myself for a while, probably have this idea that they got from like movies or whatever, where it's like a bunch of different people with distinct personalities living inside of somebody.
[00:26:24]  Right, right, right.
[00:26:24]  Right?
[00:26:24]  Like a Dr. Jackson.
[00:26:25]  It literally is like from the movies.
[00:26:27]  Exactly.
[00:26:27]  Turns out that's like not how it works, but also like the whole thing might just be fake as such.
[00:26:35]  Like it's, you know, I'm not super up on the actual scientific literature of it.
[00:26:38]  It's very contentious whether it actually exists.
[00:26:41]  I think DID or something.
[00:26:42]  DID.
[00:26:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:43]  I think kind of both.
[00:26:44]  Okay.
[00:26:45]  But I mean, not to say that people can't have something that mimics that.
[00:26:49]  Or presents.
[00:26:50]  It presents as that, you know, like a functional disorder like that.
[00:26:54]  And certainly people can have kind of like minds that are segmented.
[00:26:57]  You know, I mean, you see a lot of this MKUltra.
[00:27:00]  Well, my always my understanding with at least multiple personality, and this is also with borderline as well, which is another thing that gets thrown around kind of like just as a, I don't know, but as a legit diagnosis.
[00:27:15]  Yeah.
[00:27:16]  Is that what it marked was severe, severe childhood trauma.
[00:27:20]  Yes.
[00:27:20]  And I mean like severe infant trauma where someone has, as, you know, at a very young age has incurred such an intense and like shocking amount of trauma that they've literally had to split themselves in order to parcel away certain aspects of their mind and the way that, you know, and their memory in order to continue functioning in like reality.
[00:27:48]  Right.
[00:27:48]  Yeah.
[00:27:49]  So that being said, because of that, it's quite rare.
[00:27:53]  Very rare.
[00:27:54]  Like very, very rare because that, you know, thankfully, that is not something that, you know, occurs at, you know, in every childhood's, like every child's life.
[00:28:05]  Yes.
[00:28:05]  Yeah.
[00:28:05]  Yeah.
[00:28:06]  Exactly.
[00:28:06]  And like, to be clear too, even if you suffer pretty severe emotional trauma as like an infant or a child does not necessarily mean you'll develop any of this.
[00:28:15]  Right, right, right.
[00:28:16]  This is like rare even among groups that suffer from that.
[00:28:19]  Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to, it's that level of trauma where it's like so significant that, yeah, of course.

=== TikTok Tourette Trends (14:32) ===

[00:28:25]  However, enter TikTok.
[00:28:30]  Well, let me, let me start with a little personal anecdote here.
[00:28:32]  Okay.
[00:28:32]  A few years ago, I encountered somebody who I found was a plural.
[00:28:38]  And I didn't know what that meant because, you know, I'm normal.
[00:28:44]  And I looked it up and still was like, no, no way is this real.
[00:28:51]  Right.
[00:28:51]  Like, there's no way that someone's like, I do this.
[00:28:54]  And it turns out there are a whole host of people that do this.
[00:28:58]  Now, plural as such, that's what they call it.
[00:29:01]  They call it plural.
[00:29:02]  So they call themselves plural.
[00:29:03]  If you have, you know, a plurality of people within you or personalities within you, you call yourself a plural.
[00:29:09]  The totality of that is the system.
[00:29:12]  The person who you were born as, like you, is the host.
[00:29:17]  And then the little quirky characters you have in them, in you, because I'm not joking.
[00:29:22]  When I was making that, you know, sort of bit during the cold open about being a dwarf for Moria, people really do use fantasy characters a lot.
[00:29:31]  You call those your alters.
[00:29:33]  Now, it might shock you to find that the origins of a lot of this stuff come from a platform even more sick, twisted, weird, and filled with unfortunately misguided young people than TikTok, even.
[00:29:47]  Actually, TikTok probably does have more.
[00:29:49]  It came from the place where you and I met, Liz, in the Steven Universe fandom.
[00:29:55]  I don't actually know what Steven Universe is.
[00:29:57]  Me neither.
[00:29:57]  No, I don't really.
[00:29:58]  It's like a children's show with songs.
[00:30:00]  Never looking into it.
[00:30:03]  Tumblr.
[00:30:04]  Oh, God.
[00:30:05]  There were whole communities.
[00:30:06]  But yes, a lot of stuff that we're seeing today comes from, has its roots in Tumblr.
[00:30:13]  But this came from Tumblr, where people basically, you know, huge like fandom type communities people and also mixed with people who were really into their mental health.
[00:30:25]  And now TikTok, to me, actually has almost become more so than anywhere else.
[00:30:30]  I mean, Twitter, I think, got a lot of people from Tumblr after they stopped letting you show bestiality on Tumblr or something.
[00:30:38]  No, just all naked photos.
[00:30:39]  That's fine with me.
[00:30:42]  But TikTok is really where that has taken off like a motherfucker.
[00:30:47]  And so we're less left with this today.
[00:30:50]  Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's been a host of articles kind of going back, I think, to, oh, maybe even earlier this year, but maybe even last year about Tourette's and its relationship to TikTok.
[00:31:05]  Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:31:06]  You've spent a good amount of time in these communities, we'll say.
[00:31:11]  Well, my alters have, but yeah.
[00:31:14]  And the Tourette's one is really wild because, you know, I think that we all have this idea.
[00:31:19]  Maybe you've known some people that have Tourette's, usually when it's like younger kids, because usually there's a lot of behavioral work that's done to kind of minimize some of the ticks or, you know, as you're kind of like aging into adulthood.
[00:31:30]  And that's when it manifests itself, usually when you're really young.
[00:31:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:34]  And I think there was actually a kid I knew, well, whatever.
[00:31:37]  Anyway.
[00:31:38]  But, you know, it doesn't usually present, if you've seen it in the real world, in the kind of cartoonish way that perhaps you might see in these TikTok communities.
[00:31:48]  Absolutely.
[00:31:49]  I think growing up, my, What I thought Tourette's was was somebody who swears uncontrollably in like a loud yelling voice in the middle of a whole sentence that's like kind of the cartoonish version where it's just like or whatever or like penis, you know, that kind of thing.
[00:32:08]  Never seen that.
[00:32:08]  That's not actually how it presents in real life.
[00:32:11]  No, no, I've never typically several people with Tourette's.
[00:32:14]  None of them have ever done that.
[00:32:16]  Like but if you were to only encounter Tourette's via TikTok community or YouTube or Tumblr, that is what you would see.
[00:32:25]  Yes.
[00:32:26]  And in fact, you would also see people just saying Heil Hitler.
[00:32:28]  Yes.
[00:32:29]  And so this is, I want to, the Wall Street Journal again put out an article, but this is just the latest in a long string of articles in several different publications talking about this sort of recent phenomena of TikTok ticks.
[00:32:43]  And I want to read a little passage.
[00:32:44]  Actually, could you read a little passage from this?
[00:32:46]  I like your much more sonorous voice than I do.
[00:32:49]  Oh, thank you.
[00:32:50]  I would love to.
[00:32:53]  Roughly 30 teens referred to Rush University Medical Center in the past year displayed a range of involuntary actions from jerking arm movements to curse words to head and neck twitches.
[00:33:05]  Self-injurious behavior was common, according to some doctors, with many patients displaying bruises and abrasions resulting from their tics.
[00:33:14]  Caroline Olvera, a movement disorders fellow, noted that numerous teens were saying the word beans, often in a British accent.
[00:33:27]  Yeah, baby.
[00:33:29]  Even patients who didn't speak English were saying it.
[00:33:33]  Yes.
[00:33:34]  Some patients mentioned they had seen TikTok videos of others with ticks.
[00:33:39]  So, yes, that is.
[00:33:43]  Yeah, so there was a whole, there was a whole viral kind of, I don't know, like moment on TikTok, on Tourette's TikTok, where people were just kind of shouting out beans.
[00:33:58]  Yes.
[00:33:59]  Yes, they were.
[00:34:00]  And then suddenly, teens were presenting this to doctors at a medical center that they said they were having Tourette's symptoms, but they were just saying beans.
[00:34:11]  Yeah, yes, yeah.
[00:34:13]  And they were also like, they had these, you know, they, if you watch these videos, you know, you'll see people make these sort of like very over-the-top and like to me, an adult, clearly fake ticks, right?
[00:34:26]  Like, I've known people who've had real ticks, a lot of people who've had real ticks.
[00:34:30]  And like seeing some of the way these people act, a big thing, a big trend on TikTok is cooking with Tourette's.
[00:34:38]  Where I know, yes.
[00:34:40]  And this is a trend with like a lot of people doing it and a lot, and I mean a lot of different views.
[00:34:47]  And the really common thing with these videos is somebody in a kitchen filming themselves, often over multiple parts, trying to cook like a pretty basic meal, but they have Tourette's.
[00:35:00]  And so there was one video, I think I sent this to you yesterday, of this sort of like witchy woman, maybe in her early 20s.
[00:35:06]  I think it was called like witchy Tourette's or something.
[00:35:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:09]  This witchy woman in her early 20s.
[00:35:11]  Like, I saw it, and it was like spaghetti going over her head.
[00:35:13]  And you, and yeah, at one point, she throws a bunch of dry spaghetti all over the kitchen.
[00:35:19]  She's like, oh, it's so hard living with Tourette's.
[00:35:21]  You clearly just watch this woman not like having a tick.
[00:35:25]  She's just very obviously taking an open bag of spaghetti and then throwing it.
[00:35:30]  Yeah.
[00:35:30]  And like, yeah, and she's like, oh, tomatoes.
[00:35:33]  It's so crazy.
[00:35:34]  Yeah.
[00:35:35]  Everywhere.
[00:35:35]  And I want to be clear: this is mimicked by people who say they have like DID and stuff where they'll like have like an altered state and like pass out.
[00:35:42]  I think there's videos of this woman too saying that she goes into like a fugue state because of her Tourette's and like kind of passes out while sizzling things.
[00:35:52]  Crazily enough, they film, they have the wherewithal to film all this, but you know, but you know, videos have a lot of commonalities, often young people, sometimes not so young people, which is really distressing.
[00:36:04]  You know, colored hair, maybe some tattoos, you know, the kind of people you like make, you would think make videos like this.
[00:36:11]  And, you know, I was like, that's fucking crazy.
[00:36:14]  And I started looking more into it and I looked at these studies and particularly the study that was done in Germany.
[00:36:21]  And so check this out.
[00:36:23]  In 2019, this huge slew of Tourette's, similar exactly to what the passage you just read, a huge group of young people were ferred to this, I believe, Tourette's clinic in Germany.
[00:36:35]  I think around 50 of them.
[00:36:36]  Mostly girls.
[00:36:37]  Like, in fact, vast majority of them being girls.
[00:36:40]  In general, this stuff seems to be affecting young girls a lot.
[00:36:43]  Yes.
[00:36:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:36:45]  I think young men are driven more insane by freaking Call of Duty.
[00:36:49]  I'm making really a joke there.
[00:36:51]  But every patient was engaging in basically the not actually basically every patient was engaging in the identical, exact same behavior, not even similar behaviors.
[00:37:02]  The exact same ticks, the exact same like phrases that they blurred out, everything.
[00:37:08]  And it turns out that the researchers traced all of this back to a Tourette influencer in Germany, the second most popular YouTuber in Germany, a guy named Jan Zimmermann, who runs a YouTube channel called Gewitter im Kof, which, you know, if you don't like my pronunciation there, sorry, you shouldn't have done the Holocaust.
[00:37:29]  And it's, you know, I watched some of this guy's videos.
[00:37:33]  They're in German.
[00:37:33]  You know, I don't thank God know how to speak that language.
[00:37:36]  I'm just, you know, I love you guys.
[00:37:38]  Not.
[00:37:40]  But, you know, it's like, even watching this guy, and actually the researchers in their paper talk about this too, like he might likely have a mild case of Tourette's, but he also is like, has functional like ticks and stuff.
[00:37:54]  So like ticks that people with Tourette's don't actually do.
[00:37:57]  And one of the things he yells out, like you said, is Heil Hitler.
[00:38:00]  So you have like 50 kids coming into this, and some of who were actually diagnosed by doctors with Tourette's because their symptoms actually functionally mimic the symptoms of Tourette's.
[00:38:13]  Right.
[00:38:13]  Referred to this clinic, all with the same symptoms, all yelling at Heil Hitler, all doing these like really like throwing pens and all this kind of stuff.
[00:38:21]  And the only way a lot of them snapped out of it was being told, like, you don't have Tourette's.
[00:38:26]  Yeah.
[00:38:26]  So this is what they're calling it a mass social media induced illness, which is an incredible thing to just say out loud.
[00:38:35]  Mass social media induced illness.
[00:38:37]  I mean, it feels like the Salem witch thing, you know, but like for a new age.
[00:38:44]  Yeah.
[00:38:45]  Watching this sort of kind of social behavior develop out of nowhere and for no reason, or perhaps for some reason.
[00:38:54]  I mean, I think there are some reasons here.
[00:38:56]  I think the Salem thing is a good example.
[00:38:58]  A lot of the big example that people use are the dancing plagues.
[00:39:03]  Sure.
[00:39:04]  And which I'm so glad I wasn't around for because I don't know if you've ever, you know, if you ever saw that.
[00:39:09]  But then you might know how to dance.
[00:39:10]  I can't dance.
[00:39:11]  Well, perhaps if there was a plague, you would have learned.
[00:39:13]  Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
[00:39:14]  Or maybe I would have been the sole survivor in my little Bavarian town when they took place.
[00:39:19]  But, you know, these like plagues are these sort of like mass like hysteria.
[00:39:23]  They're often called mass hysteria, but like in this instance, like actually manifesting themselves as illness.
[00:39:29]  There was one in New York where a bunch of people, like kids, thought they were sick at this high school.
[00:39:33]  There's been like a few, like there was like a mad gasser incident in some town in America where people thought a guy was putting gas into their homes and stuff like that.
[00:39:42]  It's funny because we just did that episode on Havana syndrome, which sort of like weirdly mimics a lot of this as well.
[00:39:48]  Exactly.
[00:39:48]  That's, look at her.
[00:39:50]  Fucking much.
[00:39:51]  You should write this goddamn paper.
[00:39:53]  You're right.
[00:39:54]  Yes.
[00:39:54]  It's a mass psychogenic illness.
[00:39:56]  Oh, thanks.
[00:39:57]  And it's, I think what's- I mean, I know.
[00:40:01]  But what's crazy, because think of all those other incidents barring Havana syndrome, although kind of including Havana syndrome, all of them have something in common, which is locality, right?
[00:40:10]  Yes.
[00:40:11]  It's always in a kind of like localized thing where it's kind of spreading because it's physical.
[00:40:16]  Ah, I know where you're going with this.
[00:40:18]  But because it's social media, the localities aren't controlled.
[00:40:23]  It's basically, it can be anywhere because it spreads via the information superhighway, which we all, like we said, are surfing whether we like it or not.
[00:40:31]  Exactly.
[00:40:32]  And so, I mean, listen, also, if you're listening to this in 2040 on your Google Glass 2 headset and your Facebook X Bose.
[00:40:47]  Your Zune, which you purchased on eBay.
[00:40:50]  Zune X Supreme headphones.
[00:40:53]  eBay 2.
[00:40:54]  Yeah.
[00:40:55]  In the future, everything's the same company, just with a 2 behind it.
[00:41:01]  You know, we're at the very, we're not at the beginning, but we're like still at the nascent state of all of this.
[00:41:09]  So I think this is going to get a lot worse.
[00:41:11]  And like, what's crazy is like, this is fucking huge.
[00:41:15]  And if you're normal, you probably don't even really know it exists.
[00:41:19]  Right.
[00:41:20]  Like, it's like, you would might never encounter this outside of like a straight article or something.
[00:41:26]  But let me tell you, your kids are.
[00:41:28]  Yeah.
[00:41:30]  And what's so crazy about this is too, is, is that I got to thinking with the TikTok ticks is that like, I watch a lot of these videos and these people, you know, sort of have these like arm motions or, you know, like jerking around and stuff.
[00:41:43]  And it mimics so much to me the dances that they do on TikTok, which are like made for portrait mode.
[00:41:50]  Right, right.
[00:41:50]  So small movements.
[00:41:51]  All these movements are sort of designed for, confined to, produced by the screen that they're meant to be shown on.
[00:41:59]  Exactly.
[00:41:59]  And so there's a bit of a dialectical movement.
[00:42:03]  Precisely, baby though.
[00:42:04]  Precisely.
[00:42:04]  It's dialectical Tourette's.
[00:42:06]  And these people are like getting these symptoms.
[00:42:09]  And functional symptoms means it's like, you know, like they have these symptoms.
[00:42:13]  They are real symptoms.
[00:42:15]  But like at that point, it's like, are you thinking, well, you got to think like, well, if these people functionally have Tourette's, they got Tourettes from fucking TikTok.
[00:42:25]  You got to ask.
[00:42:26]  I mean, there is a, there is a, at the beginning, like in the abstract of this paper, the researchers wrote, functional Tourette-like symptoms can be regarded as the modern form of the well-known motor variant of MSI.
[00:42:40]  Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our postmodern society, emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behavior and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.

=== Functional Tourette's from TikTok (07:04) ===

[00:42:57]  Yeah, this reminds me a lot.
[00:42:59]  We were talking about this yesterday before the episode, and I was saying, you know, this reminds me a lot of what like Beng Chu Han's work.
[00:43:08]  We've mentioned him on the podcast before, and he's become the kind of like, I don't know, like, I don't know what you would call him, the kind of like pessimistic philosopher of the new media age of social media.
[00:43:24]  And he kind of basically, you know, he, a lot of his work is focused on breaking down the kind of like productive networks of these social media apparatuses and what they end up kind of producing or not producing.
[00:43:42]  He talks a little bit about how basically like digital networks, you know, contra like traditional media, there is no possibility for them to kind of generate any kind of public, right?
[00:43:57]  There's no possibility because of the way that they, you know, there's windows on a computer communicating with other windows on a computer.
[00:44:08]  Yeah.
[00:44:08]  And there's a way in which, you know, this produces like increased feelings of isolation and individualization.
[00:44:20]  And there's no, when there's no kind of foundational possibility for a public or any kind of we or a mass, all it does is kind of produce individualized noise everywhere.
[00:44:34]  Right.
[00:44:34]  Yeah.
[00:44:35]  And that's the only thing it can ever produce.
[00:44:37]  Yeah.
[00:44:37]  Yeah.
[00:44:39]  He says that like this kind of quality also has this, I mean, you mentioned the dialectic, like this quality, this, that, you know, that function like has basically like it also at the same time flattens everyone's experience.
[00:44:57]  Now, this is something we've talked about with social media where like it kind of flattens everything into a permanent present.
[00:45:04]  Yeah.
[00:45:04]  There's no possibility for time to exist in the digital in terms of like history.
[00:45:09]  There's no movement of history, right?
[00:45:10]  Yeah.
[00:45:11]  You talk about the dialectic.
[00:45:12]  There's no movement.
[00:45:13]  There's nothing moving forward or backward.
[00:45:15]  It is this flattening kind of extended total presence that just exists on forever.
[00:45:25]  Even in these moments, it's just these like snapshots of eternal present.
[00:45:29]  So you're sort of like in this fucking chronological terror, like wallowing in it.
[00:45:33]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:45:34]  Absolutely.
[00:45:36]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  I mean, that's, that's, that's what I think, I mean, I've talked about this kind of clumsily probably on the show before.
[00:45:44]  Like, I'm going to talk about pretty much everything pretty clumsily, but like, like, I think that this, the way that our brains are, you know, I'll speak, I'll use the I statements.
[00:45:55]  I think the way that my brain functions is pretty similar probably to the way people's brains have functioned for quite a while.
[00:46:00]  Like it's not, my brain hasn't evolved in the past hundred years.
[00:46:04]  Like my brain isn't like that much different than anybody that came before me.
[00:46:07]  In fact, it's quite a bit smaller.
[00:46:11]  But I don't think that my brain can really handle this sort of system shock that is given to me by like not only like these social media outlets, but just the idea of this sort of mass connectivity to other people.
[00:46:24]  And like that, that like that flattening you're talking about.
[00:46:28]  Like that's not the way that I'm supposed to think about time or like a place or presence or anything like that.
[00:46:33]  Yeah, or anything.
[00:46:34]  I think too, like there's this logging on too, right?
[00:46:39]  Which again, we've talked about the kind of like the demands of the digital escape, whether it's on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or whatever, like I'm just talking about all of them, our digital lives, is that it's a demand for like a positive interaction.
[00:46:55]  And I don't mean positive in terms of like a judgment here.
[00:46:58]  I'm talking about like, no, I don't mean it in that way.
[00:47:02]  You're so hot.
[00:47:03]  No, I mean it's on.
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:04]  There is no, there's no possibility of any kind of, you know, again, to get dialectic, there's no possibility for any kind of negative action, right?
[00:47:12]  It's always positive.
[00:47:13]  It's always on.
[00:47:14]  It's an affirmative.
[00:47:17]  And it does not allow any space for anything else.
[00:47:20]  Everyone has to be on.
[00:47:23]  And because of that, and this is what Han, you know, gets into, and I think this is absolutely correct, but he says that, you know, that missing negativity, the impossibility of dialectical movement, right?
[00:47:37]  Of moving forward, that constant positive, it's that missing negativity that leads to these pathologies.
[00:47:44]  That he says that, you know, you see this outgrowth.
[00:47:46]  We talked about, you know, eating disorders on early Tumblr, bulimia, you know, binge, even binge-watching as the kind of activity itself, binge eating.
[00:47:56]  These are all sorts of pathologies.
[00:47:59]  He sees them as symptoms of what he calls post-viral violence, which I think is very elegantly put.
[00:48:09]  But it's the violence of this positivity, this positive action against like which like nothing else can be applied.
[00:48:17]  So you see illnesses like depression, ADHD, borderline, what I think we're seeing with DID or with these Tourette's, that he says they're not infections, but infarctions.
[00:48:29]  Because without with there no possibility for negative movement, there's a blockage happening and a necrosis is occurring.
[00:48:38]  And that's where these pathologies emerge up.
[00:48:41]  So they're more like infections from a rot that's already there.
[00:48:44]  Yeah, an infarction.
[00:48:45]  So when I don't know what that means.
[00:48:47]  Well, it means when something's blocked.
[00:48:49]  And so a tissue starts to die and rot.
[00:48:54]  And he's saying that these are symptoms of that rot because there's a blockage occurring with this constant demand for the positive demand of being online.
[00:49:09]  There's no two-way flow there.
[00:49:11]  Absolutely.
[00:49:11]  Yeah.
[00:49:11]  And so, you know, it's great.
[00:49:14]  He calls the phenomenology, as opposed to phenomenology in Hegel's, the phenomenology of the spirit is, you know, in the Hegelian formula, it's like a phenomenology of pain.
[00:49:24]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  Right.
[00:49:26]  Han says that the phenomenology of the digital is a phenomenology of liking.
[00:49:32]  And it's this constant affirmative that is leading to these sorts of perversions that are developing in our society.
[00:49:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:45]  I think to me too, like it is, is whenever you post something to social media or put something out in social media too, it's like you're inviting that.
[00:49:55]  Like, and it's like, that's, that's something I think that like, I really, you know, you kind of got to examine at some point for each and everybody got to do it for themselves.

=== Phenomenology of Liking (15:51) ===

[00:50:02]  It's like, why are you doing this?
[00:50:04]  Right.
[00:50:05]  Because a lot of it, I think, is almost like this rote routine you get into.
[00:50:08]  It's like you post your thoughts, you post your picture or whatever.
[00:50:11]  But it's like what you really want is that positive engagement from somebody, right?
[00:50:16]  I'm not even talking, like, I'm not saying like, oh, Brace, you're so handsome.
[00:50:21]  Like, but like, you know, you want an affirmative thing.
[00:50:24]  And like, that reminds me so much of like, you know, I love gambling.
[00:50:27]  You know, they call me, they call me snake eyes, right?
[00:50:30]  Like, cause I'm always rolling that.
[00:50:32]  I feel like we could insert a clip here of you saying on the podcast, I hate gambling.
[00:50:37]  Las Vegas should be carpet bombed.
[00:50:40]  Gambling needs to be made illegal.
[00:50:42]  I mean, it is worse than fentanyl.
[00:50:45]  Things have changed.
[00:50:46]  It's the dialectic.
[00:50:47]  It's the dialectic.
[00:50:48]  Exactly.
[00:50:49]  Because you always win gambling.
[00:50:52]  Again, I think there's probably a quote from you on the hotel.
[00:50:54]  I will be real.
[00:50:55]  I looked into it more.
[00:50:57]  I've been crunching the numbers on this.
[00:50:58]  Actually, if you gamble long enough, not only do you make it all back, but you actually can make millions.
[00:51:02]  Ah, I see.
[00:51:03]  Once you push through the gambling.
[00:51:05]  Exactly.
[00:51:05]  You get to gambling too.
[00:51:07]  And that's a lot more profitable, let me tell you.
[00:51:11]  But it's the same sort of like this compulsive behavior, right?
[00:51:18]  And it's like, and it sort of, I mean, I really examined it a lot in sort of the past like few months with myself.
[00:51:26]  Yeah, me too.
[00:51:27]  And it's like, I got to tell you, logging onto the internet is a miserable experience.
[00:51:33]  I think for a lot of people, I'm not going to say most people, I don't know, but I think for quite a lot of people, at least how I hear people talk about it, is it's even if nothing actual, like no one's being like, oh, you fucking, you know, moron, like you look weird or whatever.
[00:51:47]  That's not, that's not even what I'm talking about.
[00:51:49]  But the anxiety of seeing all this, the overwhelming barrage of useless information, which even information seems like a, too nice a word for it.
[00:52:00]  All of this stuff does something bad.
[00:52:02]  I mean, you always hear people like, oh, I don't read anymore or whatever, because your attention span is fucked, but it's not only your attention span is fucked.
[00:52:08]  Is that you have this anxiety in you?
[00:52:11]  And like, that's what's so interesting to me with all these mental illness things is it's because like these people are saying they're lying, but they're saying that, or they don't, I don't even know if they consciously know they're lying, but a lot of the people, maybe not the influencers, are saying that like, well, connecting to other people with these mental illnesses have helped me so much, right?
[00:52:29]  Online.
[00:52:31]  Where actually I think what it is, is that the same thing that's smoking, if you'd read Alan Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking, which again, I have read and did not quit smoking from.
[00:52:40]  But, you know, something that he says in it is like, people think of smoking as a way to lessen anxiety, right?
[00:52:47]  But what smoking actually does is heighten your overall anxiety by an extraordinary amount.
[00:52:52]  And your discomfort in day-to-day life is an extraordinary amount.
[00:52:56]  And the cigarette briefly diminishes that anxiety, but it still is so much higher than it would be if you just didn't smoke at all.
[00:53:04]  And I think that's like that, that and gambling are such apt fucking comparisons to this stuff because it's harmful for you.
[00:53:11]  It kills you.
[00:53:12]  And also with smoking, and I know I do this, if someone tells you it's bad for you or to stop, I immediately have a billion excuses why I can't.
[00:53:21]  Yeah, but I think there's something else, which is that, you know, we touched on it at the beginning, which is people are spending six and a half, seven hours a day on this.
[00:53:30]  And I said, oh, that's like a workday.
[00:53:31]  And it's like, no, it is.
[00:53:33]  And for many, many people, their lives run on these platforms.
[00:53:40]  And I mean, like, look, you and I, right now, we are recording.
[00:53:44]  This will be listened to on phones by other people.
[00:53:47]  We generate our income online because as this podcast is spread and people subscribe, a lot of whom found out via social media and Twitter.
[00:53:57]  And that is like how we like, you know, make money and feed ourselves and all of those things, you know?
[00:54:05]  Yeah.
[00:54:06]  And I think that's not, that's just like one, you know, people have online stores or people have monetized their own, you know, Instagram accounts or their own, you know, they have small business pages for their Facebook or whatever.
[00:54:19]  I mean, there's so many examples.
[00:54:22]  It is so much, this stuff is so much more than a cigarette, I think.
[00:54:27]  Yeah.
[00:54:27]  It's like, imagine if entire economies were running on those things, you know, like this stuff is fully, fully enmeshed in our society, in social, the social production of our society, that it's difficult to even separate it out.
[00:54:49]  Like, it's hard for me to kind of conceive of it as these, like, kind of like, even as like something that exists on a phone that can be put in a pocket or whatever.
[00:55:00]  You know what I mean?
[00:55:01]  Like, it's, it's interesting, you know, I think that this, you were talking about the compulsion to like share.
[00:55:07]  And part of that is like that is built into the demands of the platform, right?
[00:55:13]  Because there is this call for transparency that's again baked into that kind of call for the constant positive movement.
[00:55:21]  And, you know, transparency has the, you know, this kind of transparency, this quote unquote transparency.
[00:55:29]  It has the purpose of basically turning everything that's inside.
[00:55:34]  turning it into the outside, where it can kind of take a positive form.
[00:55:40]  Like what's inside you can take a positive form to become information that can then generate economic value on these platforms.
[00:55:47]  Right.
[00:55:48]  Whether that's you and me right now recording a podcast or whether that is, you know, just someone sharing a post on Twitter and Twitter itself generating economic value from that, either, you know, from the tweet itself or from pulling data out of it and then monetizing that data as they sell it bundled up with other things, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:56:09]  Right.
[00:56:11]  And it's in that kind of outward sphere that, you know, that kind of information can like circulates without any kind of context.
[00:56:23]  And that circulation gets accelerated and accelerated.
[00:56:28]  And secrets, otherness, or like any kind of these like negative kind of the idea of like not being on it or any kind of blocks, they become blocks to that free circulation of information, which is the commodity, which is then key into the circulation of capital.
[00:56:46]  And so those blockages need to be dismantled.
[00:56:49]  And so you see it's this like bigger machine at work.
[00:56:53]  And you mentioned how you've been thinking about this a lot.
[00:56:55]  I have been thinking about this like a lot for, I don't know, like the past like six months, like I can't go on Twitter.
[00:57:03]  It makes me feel like sick.
[00:57:05]  Yeah.
[00:57:05]  Yeah.
[00:57:05]  And I haven't really been fully able to understand like what that reaction has been where I just like, I haven't been able to, it sounds so stupid, but it's like, I can't post, man.
[00:57:17]  But I really like feel that way because I go on there and I'm just like, what the fuck is all this?
[00:57:22]  Yeah.
[00:57:23]  You know?
[00:57:23]  Yeah.
[00:57:24]  And I start feeling really sick.
[00:57:25]  I start to see the way people are interacting with each other and these things that, I mean, we talk about on the show all the time, the same shit, watching it, this like eternal recursion.
[00:57:35]  I think the reason why it's the same thing over and over again is that it mimics.
[00:57:39]  It's that circuit of capital, right?
[00:57:40]  watching constantly and moving faster and faster and faster in these kind of social media, like, productive spheres.
[00:58:22]  Like, you said you were reading that book, The Twittering Machine, right?
[00:58:25]  Yeah, it's a good book.
[00:58:27]  Richard Seymour, I think.
[00:58:28]  Richard Seymour, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:29]  He talks about how you kind of like input yourself into the machine and it presents to you an image of yourself as a commodity.
[00:58:41]  Yes.
[00:58:41]  And that's what we're, that's, you know, you're watching this commodity that, you know, again, the circuit, whatever, you're watching it kind of in real time, even if you don't realize it, that's what you're seeing, this like perverted version of yourself back to you.
[00:58:52]  And yourself as a commodity is then exchanged, you know, for likes and upvotes and retweets, comments, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[00:59:01]  And so it should come as no surprise to any of us when you say that out loud that like, yeah, this is a dysphoric, nauseating like experience.
[00:59:08]  Like this causes mental illness.
[00:59:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:11]  Because like that is not something that, you know, when you are confronted with the apparatus like that, so like right in front of you, it is disorienting.
[00:59:22]  It is perverting.
[00:59:24]  And something that you and I were talking about yesterday, too, is that because of that, it's actually like this DID, like, you know, bifurcated mind sort of trend is actually almost the most honest sort of social media.
[00:59:40]  Yeah, it's a human response to this insane apparatus of production.
[00:59:46]  Exactly.
[00:59:47]  And so it's like, well, these people are saying that they have all these different selves within themselves, right?
[00:59:52]  And like these different personalities and these different characters, essentially, that they have.
[00:59:57]  It's almost like self-fan fiction, right?
[01:00:00]  Except I can't imagine a lot of these people seem like they're very big fans of themselves, unfortunately.
[01:00:06]  Depression runs heavy in these circles.
[01:00:09]  But it's like they are doing, I think, just to a more like extreme extent to what a lot of other people are doing, which is like putting essentially dividing their consciousness, whether they're really, quote, doing it or not, into all of these different selves.
[01:00:28]  I mean, it is, brother, if you explained this to some fucking CIA guy in the 50s, like that you're going to be able to do this, he would probably hug you so hard that your fucking neck would snap.
[01:00:41]  Because now it's like you have just everybody essentially willingly driving themselves insane, or at least at the very least, I think for a lot of people into a minor depression and anxiety disorder because of this.
[01:00:56]  And it's like, the thing is, even if they found out tomorrow, or they, we know all of this, but even if it was proven in some way tomorrow that all of these are solely net negative for everybody, which I do believe they are, or at least overwhelmingly net negative, I'll say that.
[01:01:16]  Then it doesn't matter.
[01:01:17]  Like the train is rolling, baby.
[01:01:20]  You know, it's, it's, we were talking about Young Chomsky the other day driving back from Philly, how there might be eventually like, you know, they're going to eventually run out of server space for all of this.
[01:01:30]  That's why I am a content maximalist now.
[01:01:33]  Everyone needs to use as much servers, open up 50 websites.
[01:01:37]  Here's the thing.
[01:01:38]  I think that's true.
[01:01:39]  I mean, it is true.
[01:01:39]  We know that.
[01:01:40]  But that just means that the system will recalibrate and colonize and conquer new lands, new bodies, new spheres, whatever.
[01:01:49]  As, you know, there will be a crisis and perhaps a moment of opportunity or not.
[01:01:55]  I don't know, but it will reconstitute and recalibrate and grow and grow and grow.
[01:02:00]  Its only drive is growth.
[01:02:01]  You know, you can't stop that.
[01:02:04]  I don't know.
[01:02:04]  It's interesting.
[01:02:05]  Like, we just got done doing these live shows.
[01:02:09]  And so it's like all on my mind, this like difference between the digital and like, you know, this experience we just had doing these live shows.
[01:02:17]  I don't know if you've been thinking about that.
[01:02:19]  I've been thinking about that, but also even just recording more in person and not recording.
[01:02:23]  Which is, yeah, having it not mediated.
[01:02:26]  It's just different.
[01:02:27]  It's way different.
[01:02:28]  I hate looking at the screen.
[01:02:29]  I really hate looking at the screen.
[01:02:31]  Yeah.
[01:02:31]  I don't know.
[01:02:32]  It's funny.
[01:02:33]  I think like you and I and Young Chomsky, we've talked, we were talking about it before.
[01:02:40]  Like we have been feeling like a bit of burnout, I think.
[01:02:44]  And like some of that is that you're stuck in this kind of like the endless sort of like mode of like creating content, right?
[01:02:54]  Which is what we do.
[01:02:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:56]  And having this kind of like productive existence that has to like, oh, twice a week, two times, produce, comment, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
[01:03:05]  And it does feel sometimes like I think that we can get bugged, like, I don't know, at least me, like, I get bogged down because it feels like, oh, what's going on in the world?
[01:03:13]  We have to comment on this.
[01:03:14]  Yeah.
[01:03:14]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:15]  We have to be in the present.
[01:03:16]  There has to be the affirmative.
[01:03:18]  We have to exist, whatever.
[01:03:20]  And, You know, it's like, you know, having this kind of, I don't know, productive existence, like what we produce.
[01:03:28]  Like we are producers, right?
[01:03:30]  Yeah.
[01:03:30]  That's what we do.
[01:03:31]  We produce content.
[01:03:33]  And some, you know, we produce something that basically exists purely online or is like extensively primarily mediated by this like digital sphere.
[01:03:44]  And it, you know, it trips me up a lot.
[01:03:47]  I think that I think both of us have a really hard time with it.
[01:03:51]  Yeah.
[01:03:52]  And I think some of that has to do with really starting to see and, you know, for both of us taking a step back from social media and all that, really seeing like that machine, like how intense and continuous that circuit of capital is that undergirds this like digital sphere and seeing ourselves.
[01:04:15]  I mean, at least again, I just want to speak for myself, whatever.
[01:04:18]  But like seeing myself as a commodity online reflected back to me and how sickening that whole experience has been and trying to figure out a way, again, like you said, that you can't escape it of figuring out a way like through that.
[01:04:35]  Yeah.
[01:04:36]  You know?
[01:04:37]  And I feel like it can be like really debilitating.
[01:04:41]  And that's where you get kind of burned out, you know, when you see like parts of yourself that aren't yours anymore, that are just kind of like now fully enmeshed with this other thing that is a commodity of yourself that exists.
[01:04:58]  I don't know.
[01:04:59]  It can be like a very totalizing and has been like a really like kind of paralyzing experience for me.
[01:05:05]  100%.
[01:05:06]  Yeah.
[01:05:07]  It is.
[01:05:07]  It is.
[01:05:07]  It can be, especially when you sort of observe other people interacting with it can be just, I don't know, dysphoric, I guess.
[01:05:17]  It is dysphoric.
[01:05:18]  Yeah.
[01:05:18]  So much of online is like that.
[01:05:20]  Yeah.
[01:05:20]  It's, it's bizarre.
[01:05:21]  And I want to be too like, oh, poor me about this.
[01:05:24]  But it is, you know, no, I think this is like, I'm not trying to, you know, I think this is actually like the common feeling that like everybody has, not everybody, but a lot of people have to an extent with themselves online.
[01:05:35]  Because even if you aren't like making content, if you're online posting anything, you are making content.
[01:05:40]  Absolutely.
[01:05:41]  That's what I'm trying to say.
[01:05:41]  Yeah.
[01:05:42]  Yeah.
[01:05:42]  Even if it's just like about your personal life to your friends and family, that's what it is.
[01:05:46]  And it can be, it is jarring because it's not, it's a, it's this, it's this fucking TikTok DID version of yourself, you know?

=== Dysphoric Online Experiences (06:04) ===

[01:05:54]  Yeah.
[01:05:54]  And it's just like, you know, and then we do these live shows and it's so funny.
[01:05:57]  I think like, you know, the three of us here, like, we all love doing this.
[01:06:01]  I don't mean like, you really do.
[01:06:04]  And this show that we just did, you know, we wrote it like, you know, just, you know, whatever, for people who didn't come to the show, like, it's not like a live podcast.
[01:06:12]  It's like a show that we do.
[01:06:13]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  You know, and we wrote it like back in, I don't know, 2019.
[01:06:18]  We barely even had this podcast up and running, it feels like, but we were like, fucking Mr. Rockstar, but Mr. Fireworks over here was like, we're doing a live show.
[01:06:27]  And it's true, we did, and it was great and it was so fun.
[01:06:31]  And, you know, I think it has more in common with the theater than it probably does with any other kind of form, certainly than radio, what we do when we get on stage.
[01:06:43]  And, you know, it just reminded me when we were doing this of like how important live production is.
[01:06:50]  Yeah.
[01:06:50]  And I don't mean, again, I'm not, you know, we don't mean like as rock stars, like standing on the stage and people clapping for us.
[01:06:57]  I don't mean like that.
[01:06:58]  But I mean like, you know, you and I were talking about this in Philly.
[01:07:01]  Like there's something about being live and being in the theater that is like there is this essential like confrontational aspect about what goes on there, about what happens in that room.
[01:07:14]  And that's like what gives the theater its political character, right?
[01:07:19]  And, you know, this experience we had over this past week, like it got me really thinking about like what we do and what we can do, what we want to do with this show.
[01:07:32]  I mean, we talk about that all the time.
[01:07:33]  Yeah, we do.
[01:07:35]  And also, you know, what our responsibility is as producers and like in being in this mode of production, right?
[01:07:44]  Because that is what we do.
[01:07:45]  And but there's this face.
[01:07:47]  So there's this famous piece by Walter Benjamin called The Author as Producer.
[01:07:53]  And it's in a collection of his that kind of details like his very close friendship with, and I swear to God to our German listeners, I know Bryce has already insulted you.
[01:08:03]  I'm going to insult you again because I can't, I'm just going to say Brecht, like a horrible American.
[01:08:08]  How are you supposed to pronounce it?
[01:08:10]  Brecht?
[01:08:11]  Yes.
[01:08:12]  I'm sorry.
[01:08:14]  Brother, his name is Brecht.
[01:08:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:17]  I'm not saying that.
[01:08:18]  Yeah, so, but that's what's, you know, it's a great anthology.
[01:08:21]  I think it's not in print anymore, which is one of those horrible things.
[01:08:26]  But I think that the piece, at least this essay, is on like Marxist.org or whatever.
[01:08:32]  I don't know about the translation.
[01:08:34]  Out of fairness to Brecht, we'll call him Walter Benjamin.
[01:08:39]  That one I won't do.
[01:08:41]  Okay.
[01:08:42]  But even though that seems fair.
[01:08:44]  But so there's like one point in the piece, and it's all about kind of questioning and working through the role of the author, whether that is like writer, a poet, artist.
[01:08:54]  You know, he's talking about that specifically.
[01:08:56]  I'm going to include podcaster in this or content maker, which encapsulates a lot of people listening.
[01:09:04]  But like, what is the role of the author in revolutionary struggle?
[01:09:09]  And Benjamin, at one point, he quotes himself, and I just want to read this.
[01:09:13]  He says, these extreme left-wing intellectuals have nothing to do with the workers' movement.
[01:09:20]  Rather, they exist as the mirror image of that fringe of bourgeois decadence which tried to assimilate itself.
[01:09:26]  This is the decadent strata of the bourgeoisie who try to mimic the proletariat.
[01:09:31]  Their function, seen from a political point of view, is to form not a party, but a clique.
[01:09:37]  Seen from a literary point of view, not a school, but a fad.
[01:09:41]  From an economic point of view, not to become producers, but agents.
[01:09:45]  Agents or hacks who make a great show of their poverty and congratulate themselves on the yawning void.
[01:09:52]  It would be impossible to carve a more comfortable position out of an uncomfortable situation.
[01:09:57]  And that is such a great, I mean, you're fucking smiling at me because we know, my man knows here.
[01:10:02]  What a great indictment of podcasters.
[01:10:04]  It's a great indictment of podcasters and broadly a lot of, I say, what happens on social media, what people think.
[01:10:12]  Everyone listening to this has a vision of who that quote could apply to because I think it applies to a lot of people and a lot of people who, you know, think of themselves as what he says, intellectuals or an intelligentsia or a commentario, however we want to call this, you know.
[01:10:28]  And I read that and it does feel like a finger pointed at me.
[01:10:32]  Yeah.
[01:10:33]  And it should, you know, that like, I think that is some, a criticism that we're all like very aware of.
[01:10:40]  But like, I think what Benjamin really wants to draw attention to and what the key is in that piece is what is the responsibility and the role of the authors in the revolutionary struggle.
[01:10:50]  And that's where he points to Brecht.
[01:10:54]  And you are, I mean, I know we've talked about this.
[01:10:56]  Like you're very familiar with his work.
[01:10:58]  I encourage everyone to spend a lot of time reading his plays, his poetry, his letters, everything that you can do.
[01:11:05]  You can skip mother.
[01:11:08]  Just even, you can even skip the gorky novel.
[01:11:12]  Okay, that's fair.
[01:11:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:15]  But, you know, for those of you who don't know, like, Brecht developed, you know, some people call it epic theater.
[01:11:21]  I think Brecht like basically preferred calling it dialectical theater, which is more to the point, to be fair.
[01:11:29]  But it was like a system and a mode of writing of theater and a performance and an approach that was really didactic and confrontational and dialectical in how it kind of put history into the present and whose, you know, the purpose is kind of to teach about the world by revealing the present through representing conditions as they are, like uncovering underlying systems and of production and exploitation and,

=== Alienating the Audience Through Thought (06:26) ===

[01:11:59]  you know, in this, you know, in this way of like disclosing or shedding new light on them, right?
[01:12:07]  And by doing so, you know, the attempt is like not to fill the audience with feelings, like making them feel a certain way like it would when you watch any other play.
[01:12:17]  Though like Benyamin is like, ooh, unless it's like a feeling of revolt, which I think is cute.
[01:12:22]  But it is, as like to quote him, to alienate the audience in a lasting manner through thought from the conditions in which they live.
[01:12:31]  And it's, you know, the act is to get the audience to kind of give them space to think, to really fucking think, oh, this is what's happening.
[01:12:39]  And I see myself in this moment as history is moving in this struggle, right?
[01:12:44]  Yeah.
[01:12:45]  Yeah.
[01:12:46]  And so he says, Benyamin says, when he's talking about Brecht, he says he succeeded in altering the functional relationship between stage and audience, text, production, producer, and actor.
[01:12:57]  He opposes the dramatic laboratory to the finished work of art.
[01:13:02]  He goes back in a new way to the theater's greatest and most ancient opportunity, the opportunity to expose the present.
[01:13:10]  And I think that like, this is rambling and I apologize, but like, like I said, the three of us, you know, we're constantly thinking about what we can do and how we can evolve.
[01:13:23]  And I don't think any of us are like very comfortable.
[01:13:27]  I think like the constant production, you know, whether it's on social media or, you know, the just the constant content production, you know, kind of like living in this digital apparatus, like staring at ourselves as commodities, profiting off of ourselves in this way.
[01:13:48]  Like, I don't think it's enough.
[01:13:50]  I don't think any of us want to like be a fad, to be agents, to be hacks, in his words.
[01:13:56]  You know, my greatest fear is being a hack.
[01:13:58]  Well, yeah.
[01:13:58]  And I think that like, this is something that we talk about.
[01:14:01]  Like, I'm just being really honest, you know, and direct.
[01:14:04]  Like, I think we do feel like a greater pull towards something and towards like pushing ourselves to do like better work.
[01:14:13]  And it's always a question of like, you know, how do we, how can we do that?
[01:14:19]  But I do think that we feel like a sense of responsibility.
[01:14:22]  I know I do.
[01:14:23]  Yeah.
[01:14:23]  I, God knows I spent a lot of time on this show.
[01:14:27]  No, I know, but also like we have an opportunity.
[01:14:32]  At least I, this is at least, I don't know, this is what I think about a lot is it feels like we have an opportunity and that we're smart enough to do something with it and that we can kind of figure out how to do something with it.
[01:14:45]  And this is all to say that like I do think, and it already has since we first wrote that Epstein show in 2019, but I do think that our show is evolving.
[01:14:56]  And I don't know what form it'll take.
[01:14:59]  But I know we have a lot of ideas and that, you know, That we are ambitious and committed, and I think basically almost exclusively, like about this and about what we talked about throughout this entire episode, like in terms of social media and our role as authors, as producers, and like what it means to like make truly revolutionary art in a digital sphere.
[01:15:26]  Because that's the thing is, like, when we talk about all these digital things, it's like, yes, they aren't appendages, like, these are developments in technology.
[01:15:33]  And it's our job as producers to harness that technology and understand it in order to produce something truly revolutionary.
[01:15:45]  Like, I really do think that.
[01:15:47]  And so, you know, I like don't know what comes next.
[01:15:50]  Like, I know, like, we've always said you can't log off, right?
[01:15:53]  This is the constant positive.
[01:15:55]  Like, we are on.
[01:15:56]  Like, you, me, Bracelet, Yang Chomsky, all everyone listening, like, we're on.
[01:16:03]  Everyone is on.
[01:16:04]  You're online.
[01:16:05]  Like, to live in the world is to be online at this point.
[01:16:08]  Yeah, it's indistinguishable.
[01:16:11]  And, you know, we're in this like great movement in the circuit of capital.
[01:16:17]  Like, you cannot escape capitalism's revolution.
[01:16:23]  And if we're on always, then the only question is, what do we do next?
[01:16:51]  Okay, one last quote before we leave.
[01:16:54]  And then I promise I'm done.
[01:16:57]  Yappin.
[01:16:59]  The revolutionary intellectual appears first of all and above everything else as a traitor to his class of origin.
[01:17:07]  In a writer, this betrayal consists in an attitude which transforms him from a supplier of the production apparatus into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus to the ends of the proletarian revolution.
[01:17:20]  Will he succeed in furthering the unification of the means of intellectual production?
[01:17:25]  Does he see ways of organizing the intellectual workers within their actual production process?
[01:17:31]  Has he suggestions for changing the function of the novel, the drama, poetry?
[01:17:37]  The more completely he can address himself to these tasks, the more correct his thinking will be.
[01:17:42]  And necessarily, the higher will be the technical quality of his work.
[01:17:47]  And conversely, the more precisely he thus understands his own position within the production process, the less it will occur to him to pass himself off as a man of mind.
[01:17:59]  The mind, the spirit that makes itself heard in the name of fascism, must disappear.
[01:18:05]  The mind which believes only in its own magic strength will disappear.
[01:18:09]  For the revolutionary struggle is not fought between capitalism and mind.
[01:18:14]  It is fought between capitalism and proletariat.

=== Hopefully Next Time (01:34) ===

[01:18:25]  On that note, let's sing ourselves out here.
[01:18:28]  I'm Liz.
[01:18:29]  Wait, one second, actually.
[01:18:31]  I have one more thing.
[01:18:33]  I want to be clear.
[01:18:35]  In the morning, you should not turn over and look at your phone.
[01:18:40]  You should look at the beautiful woman next to you.
[01:18:44]  Because the phone, all you're going to get in that little guy is misery.
[01:18:50]  There's a nice warm body next to you.
[01:18:52]  Or more than likely, considering the demographics, there's nothing.
[01:18:55]  And if there is nothing, don't look at the phone.
[01:18:57]  At least get up and go to the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror there.
[01:19:01]  Because that is, you know, barring a few things, one of the more unvarnished representations of yourself that you can get instead of this awful misery-making thing that makes you sick.
[01:19:13]  But yeah, you know, like I was saying too, you can always reach out and touch somebody, even if it's not in a loving way.
[01:19:20]  I'm not talking about the wife there.
[01:19:23]  My name is Brace.
[01:19:25]  We are, of course, joined by Young Chomsky.
[01:19:28]  You have been listening to Trodon.
[01:19:30]  We've got music by Robin Hatch.
[01:19:34]  And we will hopefully see you next time.
[01:19:38]  Bye-bye.
[01:19:59]  Come on.