i love all the philosophy slop content on youtube, it really makes my saturdays.
all throughout the week i try to annihilate all thoughts by listening to music or podcasts or the fake news media, (what can i say, i’m a dialectical materialist, not a dialectical id*alist) only on saturdays do i have the space to watch autism-bait about how “NO YOU CANT THINK THOSE THINGS CUZ ITS BAD OKAY!!”
recently my algorithm is full of people angry at abigail thorn for being a lady on the internet. and that’s a good thing. i am sooooooo here for it.
to do a little genealogy of why philosophy slop content is appealing, first and foremost it’s because i need long videos to play in the background while i endlessly do sudoku, and that it’s nominally about philosophy even if there’s absolutely no substance to it obviously gives me permission to indulge.
second, actually reading philosophy is really lonely, it’s a big waste of time only second to actually sitting there and thinking (of course, the worst activity, especially if you want to have any thoughts), so philosophy slop content allows me to hear someone else talk about the superficial aspects of some concept and then go “NOOOO YOU DONT GET IT LIKE I DO, heh, fucken slug…”
third, you gotta love the transmisogynistic undercurrents of it. i think one of the big entry points into 4chan for me was basically seething at abigail thorn for being a lady, and lgbt was where the good discourse apropos her and contra was back in the day. philosophy slop content has the inverted idpol rage bait appeal similar to jubilee where it’s always a white leftist hetero man with a decroded beard who’s to the left of the liberal transbian.
fourth, it has to be livestream clips that are the intellectual equivalent of the guy playing the mobile ad, where they always pause immediately after hearing something that they can’t perfectly digest, and then go “WHAT??? IS SHE REALLY SAYING WHAT I THINK SHE IS?? CHAT OH MY GOD…” and then they continue the video after about 4-6 minutes and it doesn’t say the thing that they thought it would and the video agrees with them so they need to draw some further pointless distinction. hypocrisy is my heroin.
fifth, you already know i’m obsessed with anyone who’s a gatekeeper and feels terrified that someone else will come along and do that thing they’ve invested themselves in poorly and none of the slugs will tell the difference. it’s especially great in a video about how thorn doesn’t get nietszche. “i should just fuckin do pop philosophy i wonder if i could trick [myself] and end up doing it cynically, but i think i’d end up being depressed because if it worked i’d end up having to just…” i can’t get enough.
i could go on. this is not ironic. in the past i’ve felt embarassed about it, but i truly love being a cringelord now. i genuinely wish all parties involved, the creators and the audiences, the best. so badly i want n-flowers to bloom.
n-flowers and zero-feedback are not about everything being equally valuable, make no mistake. even a liberal could understand the paradox of tolerance - how are property rights maintained?; a libertarian perhaps not. perhaps the slogan should be “make n-flowers bloom” instead of “let n-flowers bloom,” because allowing for a true rotpolitics is an active process, in the same way that nietszche saw forgetting as an active process. this is because if you think of a flower, it starts as a seed, and then it grows into a plant, which produces a flower, but of course this flow from seed -> plant -> flower isn’t a true rotting, because at each step it understands itself as seed and tries to escape in the same way that all seeds or plants do. only when it forgets itself to be a plant, and invests its abundance into a cancerous blight, does it rot.
i was a bit upset earlier in the week when the accounts in my internet bubble got mad at contrapoints. i guess i haven’t thought all that much about it but apart from everything in that situation, the strangest thing to me is the desire for her to make a video about palestine. i’m probably terminally contrarian but even if she was a manichean pro-palestinian, (my god yesterday on the majority report someone called in and was like I THINK ALL THE JEWS NEED TO GET KICKED OUT OF ISRAEL like ok bro…) like what would you be getting out of it that you couldn’t get out of chatGPT. the reason why i support n-flowers is because i understand that i want what i don’t want, and algorithms can only even give you what you want, and i don’t want what i want! before i listened to the philosophy slop content, i was listening to a less slop philosophy podcast on wilhelm reich and fascism and besides the quote we all love from it from antioedipus which i assume was why they read him, someone embarassedly brought up a really good point that apparently came from zizek, which is that the desire for fascism today comes from like a horror at feeling like you’re an incel who’s too prudish and doesn’t enjoy enough, so you need daddy trump to tell you “no! it’s good actually that you don’t have sex, being a cishet is good and revolutionary and not lame, you don’t want to have sex with children, believe me, i would know…” in this sense, the moral hypocrisy really is essential to what trump is doing.
really, the core reason why i think zero feedback is important is because i think the reason why the slop exists is because we both love it and are ashamed at it, and desperately ask artists and journalists and whateverists to make us more slop please. “i know what i want chatGPT, please kick up the 4d3d3d3.”
but wait a second! does this mean that it’s fascist to dislike the slop, that art and beauty is really bad actually, and that the good ending is the one where universal robotic master feeds every animal grey vegan goop? possibly. i might write on it sometime but i have felt in the past that there is an alignment between art, beauty, fascism, and suicide. it wouldn’t be the first time that some harebrained thought that appealed to me was bad actually, and it certainly won’t be the last. but i think where the fascist impulse bubbles out of horror at your desires and negating them, what i’m vibing with for now is affirming your horrifying desires. we’ll see where that gets me.
honestly i don’t really know what i’m saying at all, this is pretty incoherent. i’m not exactly sure “what wanting what i don’t want” means, and as far as i’m aware this is a phrase that i came up with, from the name of some lame noise rock album that anthony fantano rated highly back in the day, whos lead singer is a rapist. rape seems really bad. if you want to rape people, i think you please shouldn’t. and “horrifying desires” is maybe another thing. obviously the appeal of the repackaged “zizek take” is that i love thinking that the fascists are secretly repressed gays, trannies and chasers, but i think i had a realization a few years ago when some pedophiles raided brainworm that we think they’re repressed queers because we’re queer, and they think we’re pedophiles because that’s what they are, and that’s an even more appealing psychoanalytic structure, so maybe that’s the case? perhaps the really monstrous stuff like rape and pedophilia are downstream of other desires that one finds horrifying and represses, but i really don’t know much about the psychology of those things, nor do i really care or want to know much about them.
this past week i finished twin peaks, at least the second season of it, i haven’t yet seen fire walk with me. kinda thematic spoilers, but i really like a lot of things it did, i actually think it had a really satisfying ending, and i got out of it like a sense that evil emerges out of the desire to stamp evil out of the world, especially when that desire allows for self-sacrifice. last night i saw there will be blood, which was very aesthetically pleasing and historically stimulating, but i found it a bit less moving. it, i feel like, also thematic spoilers, almost felt like an anti-war film, in that we see capital and religion mutually grow up and evolve side-by-side each other through their war, which of course leaves hollow devastation in it’s wake.
so kinda taking these two ideas for now, what i think “make n-flowers bloom” might mean would be to have the courage to not fight that thing that horrifies you, to let people enjoy things, to let them cook
beep beoo p beop boop bop boop boop
in the world of xcvr, i made a lot of good progress this week. namely, the signet creation mechanism and the lexicon event stream should be working, so like chat history is still an endpoint that i am lacking, but besides that and probably a hundred thousand bugs to squash and step on, the backend is done! and yesterday on the frontend i got mobile layout to work a lil bit, haha, so we are really moving forward! it would be cool and it seems entirely possible to have a beta release THIS WEEK! (inb4 i spend the next 3 months lying on the couch eating hot chip and listening to mark fisher lectures)
i might make a blog for xcvr, that would be a good thing to do because i appreciate it when other new appviews have lil blogs abt them, and while this is on some level my development blog lmao, i pity anyone who in the future might be interested in how lrc works and looks at that post which is hella outdated, and then looks at all the more recent posts in horror frantically googling wtf is “rotpolitics”
in any case, this week i will certainly make channel views on my frontend of the appview actually allow you to enter your handle etc… (this has been a bit of a silly mistake land, it unfortunately might want like a redo of how signet records look because it’s important to me that lrc has the handle and not the did, since it should be human readable and i’d rather not have you send both, so i guess the signet record could have an optional did field which allows for future compatibilty if the user changed their handle, the message should still be valid)
in any any any case, RPN
-rachel