I Lost My Mind and Became a Content Creator
0:00 This video is brought to you by Nebula.
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Hello. My name is Shay, but online I go by Mr. Amazing. You may not know or care about who I am, but if you click on my channel and look at my most recent uploads, you'll notice something strange. I haven't uploaded for about a year. Before that, I didn't upload for another year. Now go to any other YouTube channel, and you'll notice that they likely uploaded within the past week. If you think I'm not self-conscious about this, you're wrong. Because probably if you clicked on this video, you want to know something about doing this thing called YouTube, and you wouldn't be alone. About 86% of kids and teenagers say that they want to be an influencer. About 70% say that they're more connected with influencers than traditional celebrities. That means that this is a position of power, position of control, however minute. And if you're not uploading very often, it's hard to say if you even have that power. Indeed, you're probably still watching this video because you saw the view count, or maybe the subscriber count, and you said something like, "Well, the number's big enough, so there's got to be something to it, right?" I say probably, because that's what I do. And that is, after a certain point, the power—the power of fixture. The ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias built a great statue to show his power. Influencers, we don't have to do that. The number is the power, and if we've done our job, it will show off for us. Ozymandias is reduced to nothing. His statues crumble, as withered by the sands of time. But what happens when there's no decay to see, when time taken away lets the number sit still or gradually decline? Am I still a YouTuber? Or is that something I was? Is there an "I" to be for? And if there isn't, who will be for me, if not the "I" that is?
1:44 [Music]
Good grief. Why does it matter? Well, let's say I'm talking to you face-to-face. How is it that you know that anything I'm saying is truthful? How do you know that I'm not lying to you? You don't. None of us do. We pretend like we do, and we use signs of trust to confirm those pretensions. Subscriber counts are one such sign. We call that good faith. But now, if I'm going to pretend that you can tell me this or that, then there has to at least be a "you" to tell me. There has to be a cause for the consequence of my being told, and that cause is you. You have the authority to tell me, because you are the author of what it is you say. Between us a contract arises, and this is the contract of good faith. You have authority and my credence. I have whatever you authored—the principle of equal exchange. But all this depends on you. You must be, as must I, if I am to hear you. We can't just plead insanity or make excuses when it's convenient for us. If we did, why would anybody listen to us? We couldn't be trusted. There must be something there in front of us capable of taking responsibility for that consistency for us. Whatever that is, that is you and yourself, as it must be for me. And it is myself, as it must be for you. This is essentially the responsibility theory of self, and we can thank John Locke and Immanuel Kant for it. And as a would-be YouTuber, if I can't own up to what it is that I am when I induce you to sign the contract of time to listen to me, well, we've got a problem. Why? Because if enough of those signs of trust start going to people who can't own up to them, we have what the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel might call a master-slave dialectic. Indeed, whenever a YouTuber or influencer more generally puts anything online, they have to at least assume their own presence before somebody else, and thereby that person who will be seeing them, an "I" and a "you". What warrants these assumptions is what I as influencer have, something we rather obscurely call truth. You don't know if it's the truth or not, and I know you don't. So I try my best, hoping that with the signs of my power, you recognize me as worthy of this trust, of being truthful. This call-and-response, sender-and-receiver mechanism is the basis of all communication on some accounts. And yet I am always a master over you in some way. I did the research, I edited the video, and I got you to subscribe. In this, my power is not just a fixture, but a flame. With enough people, just about anything can burn. This seems to be something almost inevitable about this. One leader over many followers is, for this reason, among the oldest problems in logocentric metaphysics, with its basis in the General Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter for the good of his tribe. Today the structure is much more decentralized. One partakes of competing tribes all the time. They're torn between them: one eye in a streamer's chat, one ear in the album of an artist, one types a comment in one YouTuber's comment section that responds to another, just before upvoting a top comment on their Reddit page. Then they'll go to TikTok and take advice from guru number 2,556, take some notes, watch another video, and read through a book, and on and on and on. All sides tug and pull, one led wherever his manifold leaders carry him.
4:55 Now, there's nothing wrong with this per se. It makes for good memes.
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Plus, it's also like satisfying. To genuinely provide knowledge and information to others feels good. At one level, this is what it means to be at all around other people: to be recognized as a person worthy of that very recognition. I wouldn't make these videos if I didn't think I would get at least some feedback. I wouldn't send anything out unless I felt someone's response. The more I do this, the more I will feel that I should give this response, for I must take responsibility for my history of this responsiveness. This or my taking the role of he who gives this response is my being the thing that I am for others. If I make the response to those who need food, I'm a cook. If I make the response of those who want to hear sweet sounds, I'm a musician. If I make the response to those who demand entertainment and an audiovisual presence, I'm a YouTuber. I become what repetition demands of me, developing the actuality of my soul and my person with each action I take. That's no mere analogy, of course. For Aristotle, the more we do of a thing, the more we actualize our soul in the things we do, since our soul is just the many things we do. But if I'm not uploading, then I'm not fulfilling the call-response circuit. In Aristotle's language, my soul isn't being actualized. I am not there for anyone to see, so I am not seen. I, then, am not a YouTuber. But at one point I was. I am the YouTuber I am now, obviously, but I'm not the YouTuber I was then. I'm not the person I was then. So what does that number even mean? Why should you listen to it? Why should you listen to me?
6:32 [Music]
The intuitive answer is, you are the same enough for us to recognize you. That sign is sufficient enough for us to trust you. But when is enough enough? If we hadn't built so many damn roads, we wouldn't have so much congestion. So now we have urban planners recognized for their ability to direct traffic, when in reality, if the greedy twats who built the roads hadn't done so in such convoluted ways, the urban planners wouldn't even need to correct for their mistakes. If those greedy twats hadn't done what they did, those planners could be doing something entirely different—making the world an even better place rather than correcting for mistakes caused by corruption. These corrections create entirely new opportunities for corrupt, convoluted developments. Meanwhile, those who have to live in the midst of things are just screwed over. Those people just have to deal with the mess until it someday, maybe never, gets fixed. So sure, urban planners will rightfully be recognized for the good that they do, and they will, hopefully, fix things sufficiently to make cities a bit more walkable. Their work will stay the same enough for those in the moment to maybe have their lives a bit better off. But if we look back, more corruptions will invariably show themselves. For us online in the moment, things stay the same enough for us to talk about them, and we stay the same enough to be trusted. But if we look back, our changes will create consequences we don't want, leading to more changes and more unconscious consequences—more difference that appears the same.
7:53 [Music]
I don't have many reflective memories as a child. All I know is that I was there, I felt, and I wanted to continue feeling some things more than others. I don't think I really began to seriously think about things until maybe middle school. At that point, I didn't have much consciousness of anything. My thoughts were dominated by my family, my feelings for them and their feelings for me. I only began to turn outward politically. Political reflection, as memes so often depict now, was the first time I had ever thought of anything seriously. Of course, when I was much younger, I used to like time travel and Gene Kelly and tap dancing, but not reflectively. When I think on those things, it's not me who liked them, but an instance of me, or a part of me. Now, when I began to think about what I wanted to be in the world, it was right that mattered to me. What was right in the world, what ought to be as opposed to what merely is. I graduated junior high with the highest GPA in my class. I'd gotten several awards in my sports leagues and submitted to design competitions. I'd done so many things which made me think that I could conceive of right, because I was right. Of course, where could right matter more than politics? I began reading primary political literature: "The Doctrine of Fascism", "The Communist Manifesto", "What Is Property?", and "The Federalist Papers". And then I entered into school politics and found it rather, how should I say, shit. We didn't really do anything, and the daily meetings were just rote garbage. It was student administration, so what should I have expected? Apologies if any of my student administration friends are watching this, you guys were great, but it was a waste of time. I'm pretty sure we all know it. Of course, nobody told me to do any of this. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. So I did it, and, well, what do you know, I was told that I did the right thing. This repeated with just about every single thing I did. I don't mean to brag by saying that. It was just worthless. It didn't amount to anything. All it amounted to, so far as I could tell, was an ego. I went to Catholic school, so the class sizes were small. Everybody pretty much knew each other. I was known as the guy who challenged Christianity. Respectfully, of course, but I still challenged it, and that's how people knew me. I would say to the teacher in religion class, "How do we know that God told Peter that the Mosaic law was no longer binding on the Gentiles? How do we know that this wasn't a later addition to the Gospels?" And of course, I got answers about textual dating, exegesis, the historical record, and so on and so forth. I didn't ask beyond that. But I was vocally skeptical, and that's more than I could say of my classmates. I was recognized for this, and people knew me as the guy who spoke up. Beyond this, I was recognized for all the things I had done right, and I internalized it. It became a part of me, a shell against which I could rebound criticism. "I have done so many things right," I thought to myself, "how could I do anything wrong?" It didn't help that as a child, my parents told me that I was a genius unlike all the other students. That, plus the fact that by the time I graduated high school, I was bowling captain, had my name in the local paper, was an internet influencer, had competed at national debate tournaments, and then graduated salutatorian... My god, I probably had enough ego for two people.
10:55 Then I got to college. And I wasn't just reading political theory in my bedroom. I could talk to people who studied it for a living. I'd never done anything like that before. Nobody in my immediate family is academic. I hadn't even met an academic. When I did, I realized something: they knew a hell of a lot more than me. One of my closest professors had dedicated herself entirely to the study of nuns. It sounds niche, but when I went to her office hours, her office was filled with books on medieval history and spirituality. I hadn't even read one. I went to another's office hours and it was the same, and another. After my classes with these people, I started to get really down on myself. For everything I knew, they knew something more. This went for my classmates as well. For everything I knew, they knew something else. Whatever I thought was right, someone else could always prove it wrong. Or at least, not right enough. One time in a literature seminar, we were discussing Dante. I thought I understood the text well enough—"abandon hope, all ye who enter here", Beatrice, blah, blah, blah. But when I wanted to make a point, I wasn't able to do so. I had wanted to say something about how Dante's text represented a completion of medieval consciousness, a production of a work reflecting the Middle Ages into the written word, synthesizing papal practices with medieval mysticism and theology. In class, there was no time for me to make that point. This wasn't because I couldn't articulate it. No, I'd thought about it beforehand, but it's because although my point, my perspective, was just as good as anybody else's, it didn't fit. The class was much more interested in the question of free will in Dante's cosmology. This had little to do with my historical perspective. In high school, I would have been praised for the originality of my point. In college, it didn't even get to be said. The stakes had changed. Not only was everyone around me quite intelligent, they were aware, so far as I could tell, of that same quest for recognition that I was. This wasn't a matter of being a small fish in a big pond, as people say. Rather, it was more like being a dim candle in a sea of fire. Whoever could accrue the most wax, whoever could show off the most, would burn the brightest. Seeing others gather that wax, my candle was blown out. My ego crumbled. It's not to say I didn't speak, didn't do anything. I was a research assistant, a teaching assistant, I helped design shirts for my dorm. I mean, I did things. But I had friends who interned for JP Morgan, people who volunteered in the Senate. What the hell does designing shirts for your dorm matter when you know someone who's literally helping to run the Senate? We are comparative creatures, and I know it's not healthy to compare yourself in this way, but let's be honest. Just listen to the words: "dorm t-shirt design" and "assistant in the Senate". We both know which is more important, and who is more important for having done each thing. All around me, it felt as though people were doing better. Everything I did before was now partial, finite, within a sphere of understanding so limited and inexperienced that to conceive that I had even founded an ego upon it was, for me, a flat-out embarrassment. I remember sleeping throughout the day, some days, because I had become so depressed about it. I hated everything for its falseness—myself, most of all. How could I have been so puffed up, so full of hot air? How could I have been so full of shit?
14:10 [Music]
This was about when my anxiety began, and when I put out "The Age of Anxiety". I hadn't fully realized what was happening at the time. It only came to me in glimpses and waves. And even now, this could be a bunch of nothing that I'm spinning up to make sense of things. But that is just what I couldn’t do when my anxiety and depression were at their worst: make sense of things.
14:35 [Music]
So, to answer the opening questions, I still am a YouTuber, but only because I'm doing YouTube right now. When I wasn't doing this, and I hadn't been for a while, I wasn't a YouTuber. The "I" I am now is not who I was before, and if I still am a YouTuber, then the YouTuber I am now is not the YouTuber I was before. What is the YouTuber I want to be? And who is the person I want it to make me? Who do I want to become? You might think these are abstract questions, so consider this: one of my best friends is somebody that I met making these videos. I was able to meet more people and do other things because of that friendship. If I hadn't met him, I clearly would not have been able to do or meet those people or those things. Putting things out here on this YouTube channel, on this system of vacuous, irreferential, Baudrillardian simulacra, allowed me to become someone new. Now, consider the flip side. On the left is Gregory J. On the right is Sneako. Gregory became Onision. Sneako became... Sneako. Both have done irreparable damage to the internet in different ways. Onision's irresponsibility for his recognition led him to numerous scandals involving minors. Sneako's ongoing irresponsibility led him to associate with accused domestic terrorists, and to have these associations investigated by the Senate.
15:58 "There's no question that there is a relationship between social media amplification of this extremist content and the rise we have seen in hate crimes and domestic terrorist attacks that mark one of the gravest threats to our homeland security. I'd like to take a moment to show a few examples, if you'd check the screen."
"And who's behind it?"
"Well... [laughter] We've talked about it, Sneako. A lot of Jews..." [laughter]
If you look at the earlier videos that each produced, you'll see the tendencies that gave rise to the people they would inevitably become. But a point must be stressed here. As each presented themselves, they augmented themselves for their audiences more and more. They became recognized for this augmentation, trusted for it. This shaped who they became. In some sense, each and every one of us is fashioning ourselves in the same way, through our actions. Each of us, like an alchemist, forging himself out of his own prime matter in the flames of desire. And sometimes, this desire gets out of hand. Today, the zeitgeist internalizes these things more or less as the existential crisis, the relationship crisis, and the action crisis. The first two are more obvious, and I'll have more to say on them in future videos. For now, I want to focus on the third: the action crisis. If anything, the works of Wilhelm Reich and Adorno laid the groundwork for what most now take for granted: no one can be absolutely sure that they are doing anything they think they're doing. Fascism, like the Terror in France before it, began with well-meaning people seeking, by their own lights, to do the right thing. That isn't an approval of either thing, not at all. Rather, by well-meaning, I mean that they thought they meant well. The people they killed, certainly and absolutely, did not. What Freud revealed, and what Reich and Adorno explications, was that these beliefs stemmed from the depths of unconscious desires. I'm sure you know how this Freudian story goes: instinctual desires in this story are seeking at every moment to claw their way to the surface of action, to sunder morality and orient it towards themselves. Today, this is a basic premise of evolutionary biology. We think we are progressing, all the while we remain in the same place, trapped by our ancestral drives, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Now, if this is true at the civilizational level, and civilization is reducible, at least in part, to the actors operating within it, then it's also operative at the individual level as well. Individuals, then, can never be sure of what they're doing. Oftentimes, they become not what they sought to destroy, but something so inconceivable, so radically other, that they could not have even conceived of it. Interpersonally, we can see this radical otherness in memes between interlocutors, where one points out the fallacies evident in the other.
18:43 "Yes, I can."
"Nuh-uh."
"Strawman."
"That's not a strawman. Do you even know the definition?"
"Appeal to authority?"
"You're literally the president."
"Ad hominem?"
"I agree."
Richard Rorty inaugurated this phenomenon, ironism, and I'll have more to say about this at another time as well. But for right now, the gist of it is: everybody can always say something about someone else. Every person B can always see through A, can always read through them. In this way, A is never secure in what they say or what they think they say, since B can always dismiss them. The point is, if you can never be sure of what you're doing, why do anything at all? You might just repeat the worst mistakes of human history. Each and every one of us is necessarily situated in that history. The attempts of our deepest desires to come to the fore, to dominate us. This essentially mystical view is an anxious one. Don't change anything, you might ruin it. It lies behind almost all conservative punditry, in my opinion. The mysticism lies in the hesitation to explicate possibility, to say something about the mess we have ourselves in. Instead, a conservative thinks, "Ah, good enough. It's the best we've got." As the political philosopher John Dewey pointed out, this view is the most common in politics, in the public sphere. Why? Because on one level, it's the most precarious thing. It is the sphere where we present ourselves to each other, where we recognize each other, and this is the basis of everything else. It is the secret to society. But this is what is so fruitful about human intelligence. The fact that this has already been said just now means that mysticism has already been broken apart. To speak is the beginning of wisdom. It is the shining of a light on a history, a past, which wants to remain in the shadow. This is part of the reason why Socrates was killed. He, like the gadfly he was, shined a light on the mysticism of the ancient gods. He criticized the state-sanctioned cult, and for this, he was charged with corrupting the youth. This is the same exact charge thrown at jazz back in the '20s and '30s—it corrupted the white youth; rock and roll—it's the devil's music; Marxism—it's ideological anti-Americanism, the latter view persisting to this day. Each of these, in its own way, attempted to explicate its antecedents, to point out two older examples: the jazz fusion artist Gil Scott-Heron told us that the revolution would not be televised, and the Dead Kennedys called out the hypocrisy of the US government. Marxism decries capitalism as exploitation, but I'm sure you already knew that. Each of these attempts what the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel calls self-consciousness, or otherwise, self-recognition. In Hegel's scheme, human society develops according to differences. First, some social order exists. Second, it somehow becomes differentiated. Third, this difference struggles to reshape what first existed. From this standpoint, ideological rejection can be considered a sign of the beginnings of a struggle for progress, the emergence of difference and othering of the same from itself. It points out that it is not what it claims to be. The US government is not a protector of freedom—just look at the CIA's Wikipedia page. That is self-consciousness situated in history. The conservative fights for the same to remain itself. The progressive wants this othering to play out. All of this doesn't just play out in society in the abstract, however. It also plays out concretely between you and me. This is the social reading of that master-slave dialectic I mentioned earlier, and it follows mostly the same pattern: you call me, and I respond. What I before held uncritically, I must now critically bolster in its own defense against you, the challenger. But this also doesn't just happen face-to-face, but in our own memories. According to the philosopher John McDowell, the dialectic is also internal to each of us. We are constantly struggling with ourselves to form coherent self-concepts, reflecting back on what seems other inside of us, attempting to unify it with what we took for granted. Only hereby, says Hegel, are we finally, quote, "at home with ourselves", having left the hell of incoherent differences strewn across our personal histories, we ascend into a coherent unity. As I said before, this view came to me in waves. Indeed, in the darkest depths of self-criticism and self-consciousness, the dark night of my soul, I produced an order out of chaos. I didn't really produce it, of course, I only recognized it—where, in my situation in history, my self-recognition as an actor in that history who can continue to create it, to forge myself. This is a philosophical hope, and at the individual level, it counters the philosophical anxiety expressed before, where method clarifies and speaks about the anxieties of the species. We begin to attempt only further clarification still. There is something a bit circular about this, but not viciously. Instead of circularity destroying reason, I would argue it creates its very basis, like sailors who must patch up a ship afloat in troubled waters. What once was lost, now is found. Where we were blind, we now can see.
23:21 [Music]
There's more to say about all of this, but suffice it to say, when we practice a method for taking care of ourselves, we've already begun to take such care. I like to think that hope of this stripe is something like a more complete form of the egotism that I practiced before. I am no longer uncritically seeking external validations—at least, I try not to. And when I do, I have a degree of recognition as to what's going on, or I like to think I do. We all need to be egotistic in some respect; without the ego, we are nothing. I like having those signs of my power as a YouTuber. It's part of the game, and it's kind of fun to see them grow and annoying to see them shrink. If, then, I'm going to continue becoming a YouTuber, I want to be so in the most complete way. In this respect, what I do will come before who I am, and that is my actuality. In "The Republic", Plato calls the position "he who intervenes because he knows best the good of the body." In this way, we might consider Marx something like an economic position of capitalism, Jesus and Buddha something like divine positions of the human spirit, to use T.S. Eliot's phrase. Each, in some sense, intervened in history because they had recognized themselves as worthy of that intervention. This is something, in one way, that the internet democratizes. Everyone can intervene at any time they want to, and we are torn between them. But if I want to be seriously hopeful about my interventions—and I do—then I think I should take how I make those interventions very seriously. If the method matters most, then not a moment can be spared in spelling it out. I had this thought for the first time just over a year ago, and in that time, I began writing, and I have not stopped since. I set out to clarify every single thing I could think of relating to my thought and action as a public figure who could intervene online, to render my thought as clear to myself as I could. That was what I wanted. So I wrote notes, and then I wrote some more notes, and then I wrote more, and then I summarized them, edited them, wrote more, and finally compiled all that I felt was relevant into a single document. I don't expect anyone to read all of it. It exists so that everything I say can be checked and referenced for self-consistency, if anyone wants to do so. It is primarily my philosophy, both in the colloquial sense of the general outlook that I have, but also my method. It amounts to both the grounds for my doing this and how I can do it at all, namely what in the social sciences is called hermeneutics and semiotics. Check the links in the description for more on that.
25:36 [Music]
Now, why does any of this matter? Again, if I'm the one who's talking to you, and if we agree that I exist, and if we agree that I need to be responsible for that existence as a thinking being who is creating his world with every action he takes, then I need to be absolutely, unequivocally, and unapologetically responsible for everything I say and everything I do. This is a very radical view, and I don't think anyone in the public has truly attempted it. I do think, however, that it is the most intellectually honest way to operate online in the public. But why does any of this matter? I made cringe compilations about seven years ago, for Christ's sake. Isn't this just entertainment? Well, yes and no. I have very lofty aspirations, and if you go to even my oldest video essay on Paperwate, even there I was making use of Marx. My theoretical intentions have always been here, and I want to continue to share them. With the rise of figures commanding followings of thousands and millions, I believe that the internet and its social possibilities have entered a new stage, that they've become something really new. These people aren't just hosting podcasts, of course they are doing that, but they're operating in the world as political actors, if only unofficially. They don't hold public office, although some people have tried. That's really not what I mean. Rather, they are people who have accrued massive followings through online exposure, now maintaining a public power and a recognition for their ability to direct action. Now, why is that? Because of their thoughts. Think a certain way and you get people to act a certain way. This, of course, begins as entertainment. How it ends, well, I haven't gotten there yet. But before I do, I want to be sure that everything that I do is as under my control as possible. That is why this matters. Taking responsibility for any possible future I envision, being towards that future. This means becoming a very different kind of YouTuber. Entertainment must give way to something else, and what that is must be determined.
27:24 [Music]
There are levels of complexity to such determination. What I have written and compiled elsewhere is this attempt at its most subtle. What results from this subtlety is what I will lay out here: the formal and material conditions to the end of being in the public well, being a responsible public actor. Before this, I need to lay out the efficient conditions of being in the public well. This video is the first efficient condition. It is the first thing that begins to create what I'm trying to do. I've laid out here a narrative which explains where I am for everyone who cares. I don't intend for this video to be popular for that reason, not at all. I think it's rather insular, idiotic. "Who cares?" I think in the back of my mind with every sentence I'm now reading. The answer is that I care. The video inaugurates a genuine attempt to do something new, to allow something hitherto unallowed. I have also inaugurated this period of activity on my blog, where I'm posting weekly on Mondays. The third efficient condition is space for correction and explication. I'll be moving forward with these on my TikTok and my second channel. I'll be streaming there every Tuesday and Thursday, reading for the first two hours and then talking with my fans for the second two. The aim here is to be in constant contact with you guys, the public at large. The video form mystifies my presence. It makes me seem much more official than I really am. This subdues responsibility by hiding it beneath a veneer of professionalism. Streams have to break that down, to smash the coat of paint that editing and scripting allows me.
28:47 Now, as to formal conditions, I think four things need to be present across these three loci of efficiency. A complete working out of these conditions is available on my blog. It's much more complex than what I've sketched here. Again, the blog is this attempt at its most subtle. This is not that.
The first thing to be present is citation, which follows from what I call the radical incompleteness of everything. Everything could have another source, because everything is not what it claims to be. If I tell you anything about anything, I'll have to refer either to my experience of the thing or the thing itself, if not both—the experience, because me telling you is not the thing I experienced, unless I'm telling you about the experience I'm currently having, telling you about the experience I'm currently having, telling you about the experience I'm currently having; and the thing, because you shouldn't trust me totally. You should experience the thing yourself. You should check and balance me to make sure I'm not wrong about anything major. To do this, everything I say must have a citation. If it doesn't have a citation, it isn't worth saying. Three things should have citations: the words I use and their definitions, the claims I make about the world, and the reasoning that I present about those claims. You should notice that in the sources for this video, I list several glossaries for this exact purpose.
The second of these principles is clarity. Everything I say should also be clear. At its most basic, this means that all my sentences should be simple, and my words easily understandable. If not, I will define them in the video. More subtly, this means three things. First, I don't want to say anything vague or free-floating. If I make a concluding claim, it should (1) be actionable in some way. I'm not interested in talking about abstract generalities unless they are particularized into some kind of social action that can be taken to address them. For instance, the very act of giving an example—that is a social action that you, citing me as a source, can use in discussion to make your case. For another, if I'm talking about corruption, I'll provide resources to read about and vote against corrupt politicians. Second, I want to ensure that (2) the bare minimum of action is some kind of tangible reaction. If I make a claim that is in no way particular to me, then chances are it's not worth saying. For instance, you and I both know that the government, Google, and every other major organization under the sun is corrupt. That's not particular. What would be particular is demonstrating how this corruption arises in a novel way. This means that the bare minimum of actionable meaning is learning something new, having a resource you didn't have before. Essentially, I don't want to waste your time. To do this, finally, I want to ensure (3) that my audience always has an opportunity to react and reflect with me. This will happen on the streams.
The third principle is consistency. I think this means being a representative of the truths I claim. If I'm talking about high philosophical topics, but can't practice a semblance of them while I'm talking about them, I think something's gone wrong. When talking about people in the social, the speaker's self-criticism is crucial. Without this, the speaker appears quasi-messianic, like a valiant fighter exposing an evil world in a cosmological drama between good and evil. I don't buy that. I'm a human, and I'm going to make mistakes. I need to admit them when I do. I then need to correct them, and institute processes to ensure that those mistakes don't happen again. If I'm not learning with you as an audience, I'm doing something wrong. I do not have a truth to give you, I have a perspective and a way of thinking that I want to share. It will sometimes be wrong, and that's okay. It has to be. Consistency is, therefore, humility. For all our reasoning, writes David Hume, we must still be men. To do anything else, to hide mistakes, is just pretentious garbage.
The final principle is dialogue. This means bringing other perspectives to bear on what I'm saying. What other people have to say, what collective experience shines light on, is always more intense than the light of one or two dim candles. Thus, I don’t claim to have any special knowledge that others can't access. I don't mean to homogenize the human experience. There will be limits to everything I say. What I'm doing right now, being candid about my commitments and what I take myself to be doing, that's a part of this. I can't be in dialogue with you as an audience if I'm not disclosing myself to you in good faith. Anything but this is, I think, an inhuman evasion of discursive responsibility. Again, this will happen most concretely on the streams, but I think there are opportunities for reflection everywhere. I'm linking a PDF checklist of these items in this and in future video descriptions. I want to be held accountable for these things progressively. Email me if you see problems I need to know about. I think this is the only way to move forward.
Of course, this then raises the question: what will I be moving forward with? I want to do three things on this channel, make three kinds of videos. They'll all be educational, but I want to educate in three specific ways.
First, I want to present you with things I find interesting and worthwhile to know. What I think is so horrible about the modern world is that most of intellectual history—the armature where my thought proceeds—is relegated to the upper echelons of academia. There are open secrets taught in college that many people, even those in STEM, don't have access to. There are guidelines for directing thought, methods for living and thinking in the world that have yet to receive popular exposure. Mankind does make its own history. Each and every person deserves to take part in it. Everyone deserves to hear Plato, bell hooks, Confucius, and James Baldwin on their own terms. They are not too good for the masses of men, women, and non-binaries.
But of course, the second thing that I want is to educate you about myself. What I want is to destroy the subject-object divide in public life. Everywhere you can find self-help channels and educational philosophical channels, but where is the person living philosophically? Where is the person attempting to make his world philosophical, to quote Karl Marx? This video is the first attempt at this, my first reflection into myself. It is through you, my audience, that I look back around to myself. Sometimes I overthink all this shit, so you'll have to forgive me if it sounds corny, but I really do love the thought. You help complete me. I wouldn’t have written any of this without this channel, without people like you who I can count on to watch it. I don't know you, whoever is watching right now, and I probably never will, but I'm glad I get to do this for you. It is absolutely a gift, and I thank you.
The third and, I believe, consummate act of this channel is mostly what I've done in the past: speculating. It gets a bad rap nowadays. People decry anything that's not data-driven as speculative, but philosophically, it has a slightly more subtle meaning. The essence of it is all I've been trying to say here. Speculation is, as Hegel would say, painting gray on gray, responsibly recognizing the present in anticipation of the future. Responsible speculation entails everything I've already been talking about, but with the added notion of arbitration, namely my arbitration. For instance, if I make a video about, let's say, The Simpsons, don't expect me to present it like a documentary. No, I'll present it as I typically have been, a mixture of history, personal experience, and interpretation. What makes the speculative is its symptomatic character. Just as a doctor attempts to recognize a bodily condition, my speculation will attempt to recognize the symptoms of a social condition. Theodor Adorno, following Hegel, calls this imminent critique of society. The grand vision I have for these speculations is to use them as case studies for the applications of the material that I give in the presentations. If I do a video on geometry, something I actually have planned, then you bet that I'm going to use those principles in subsequent speculations. The point, then, is to create a source of living knowledge, a means for interpreting and encountering the world which is richer than before you saw whatever it is I present, reflect, and speculate on. The point is to help people live more examined lives, because the unexamined life is not worth living. Again, it's corny, I know, but so be it. It sounds good in my head and on paper, so fuck it. After this, I want to host Discord discussions, panels, and work with other organizations, but all of that's not going to be for a while.
36:43 Now, again, why have I done all this? Why make this video? Isn't this just for entertainment? Aren't these just YouTube videos? Again, yes and no. What I've tried to show in this video is the YouTuber that I want to be. My showing it to you is the first step to becoming that YouTuber. I believe very strongly that there is a potential here, and that it has to be actualized scrupulously. So far, I don't think this has run true. What many have done up till now is either spout incoherent ramblings about each other...
"Sit on me!"
...at their expense, or insulate themselves into echo chambers of consumption. It's no mistake the biggest names online so far have been either conservative and vitriolic or pretty frivolous. In my view, their voices are the Freudian unconscious, avatars for our innate desire for regression. To progress is a difficult, painstaking labor. To regress is easy, like really easy. All this is the first reason for this video.
The second reason is because, well, I like doing this. I may not be one of the best at it, but I want to do it right. It makes me feel alive. I like sharing my thoughts candidly. I like being heard and helping others while I'm heard. I also have aspirations, and maybe they'll fail, but that's fine. I want something in the public to work towards, and for me, this is it. Furthermore, I want to work towards something regularly. What's so difficult about the online attention economy is that I can't just explain the entirety of Marx's or Plato's corpus in every video to every new viewer in which I want to make use of them. I need to simplify things, and unfortunately, that's going to mean some distortions. I wish I could change that, but as I've tried to show elsewhere, I can't. This is one such example. This video is long enough as it is, I don't have time to explain to you everything I have worked out there. More than that, however, I also don't think it's very time-efficient. I think I have more important things to talk about, and I think people don't want that redundancy. What doing this allows me to do is say, "I've explained this in further detail elsewhere, so please look there." Instead of explaining Marx's theory of M-C-M' every time I want to do a Marxist criticism, I'll just make a video on the basics of Marx and refer people to it whenever I need to. If I don't do this, I'm either going to be very disingenuous or misleading people, and I don’t want to do either of those things.
I have a vision for something like a Khan Academy, but with respect to the thoughts that allow us to live and thrive as people rather than as objects. I want people to come together in the public to share in the creation of a space of liberation, of voicing how they feel about this world, of breaking the silence about conditions of oppression. I want to give that a shot, and I can only hope that you will join me for the journey. This is Mr. Amazing. Thank you for watching.
39:41 [Music]
Being a YouTuber means owning up to recognition. It's a lesson I reminded myself of while watching an original series from the sponsor of today's video, Nebula. The series is "Taboo On Screen". Unfettered by YouTube's community guidelines, Broey Deschanel here unpacks recognition on screen for material I couldn't even hope to introduce here. Her work on John Waters' "Pink Flamingos" emphasizes the use of signifiers of disgust, or "recognition in deviancy," as she puts it. Waters sees trash in all of us, immediately recognizing and representing the humility required to remind us all of the reality and disgust of our humanity. Exposure to that reality is just one example of the kind of unique, high-quality content you can find on Nebula. It's a platform I co-founded with other creators in the video essay space to introduce viewers to material that would be unthinkable on YouTube. This includes Real Life Lore's documentation of Western states' neo-colonialist recognition, and Jessie Gender's upcoming short film on gendered recognition. In this way, it's much more than a streaming service. It's a platform that empowers creators like me to make exactly what we want, how we want it. Nebula was founded by creators, for creators, giving us the freedom and resources to create and explore new ideas. And the best part is, when you watch our content on Nebula, you're directly supporting us, myself included. Nebula is all about breaking the mold and funding independent creatives, leading to diverse content without the worries of the dreaded algorithm. That's right, no algorithm. No ads and no clickbait either, putting you right at the center of your viewing experience. They also offer fascinating shows like "Modern Conflicts", an in-depth geopolitics series, and "Jet Lag", a travel game show where players use real-world events as their playground. It's an innovative concept that's incredibly exciting and only possible thanks to Nebula. We're even producing a movie called "Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend", which was featured in Variety, one of the world's top entertainment magazines. Nebula is quickly, thus, becoming the answer to creating high-quality, engaging content comparable to traditional media, but without the corruption and exploitation that's often associated with that industry. For just $30 a year, or about $2.50 a month, you get access to hundreds of hours of exclusive content from video essayists like myself. If you sign up using my link at go.nebula.tv/mramazing, you'll get a whopping 40% off the annual plan. It's an amazing deal for high-quality, thoughtful videos from creators like Big Joel, Religion for Breakfast, Tom Nicholas, FD Signifier, Bobby Broccoli, and countless others. So if you want to support me and get access to exclusive content like "Taboo On Screen" while avoiding the exploitative pitfalls of traditional media, here's what you can do. Again, sign up using my link at go.nebula.tv/mramazing or use the link in the description below. You'll get 40% off the annual plan, which comes out to about $2.50 a month. It's an amazing deal for literally hundreds of hours of ad-free videos you can't find anywhere else. Plus, when you sign up using my link, you're directly supporting me as I navigate what you'll soon find out is a new chapter of my life. I can't overstate how much that means to me, and to those of you who are already subscribed, thank you. Seriously, you make what I do possible. So one more time, head over to go.nebula.tv/mramazing and join Nebula for 40% off.
42:57 [Music]
Found a mishearing? Say so.