I saw Sam Hyde and the crew perform stand up last week. Great show, I laughed my sack off, and I have nearly no patience for or interest in stand up comedy or public performance anymore. A personal problem but also a problem in the world.
On the other hand, what that show did bring into stark relief was something missing from my life and likely the lives of many others. Here was a small group of men, working together and independently on a project with verve and muscle that has some, however limited, effect on the larger world. They're doing it unapologetically, without undue deference to contemporary pieties. Their audience knows what they're in for and respects and enjoys what they're doing, and everyone else can find a fainting couch.
And here I am, in utter physical isolation, with my closest male friends hundreds of miles away, and no shared physically rooted patterns or projects, with a digitally based "career" in which I write to a totally incoherent assortment of people, many of whom would most likely disown me if they caught on to some of my political/cultural leanings or if I spoke more frankly in general. I'm not envious of those guys, I don't bring this up to seethe, but only to highlight how rare it is now, and I suspect not just for me, to feel grounded in some kind of brotherhood, to be oriented by a shared purpose with however meager a hope of influencing the larger world, beyond the sad and threadbare consolation of this rinkydink therapeutic artistic expressive practice, hemmed in by apprehensions and insecurities.
You write pretty well. I haven't seen Fish Tank and probably won't. I can barely justify watching Sam Hyde or World Peace, and I don't know if I could spend more time on that kind of material. And this point deserves much more elaboration, and I say it to myself as much as anyone, but I don't know if the Baudrillardian/simulation analytical frame has any salience or power anymore; media analysis seems played out to me, still too dominated by a fascination with entertainment or stimulation that needs to be personally worked out and transcended in concrete and practical ways and not endlessly tweezered and microscoped and repeated.
I also recently saw Sam perform and I thought about including a picture of me in the audience in this article but decided against it. I think my interest in Sam's work might be because I'm very into comedy and I take for granted that others are not as interested in it as I am; maybe calling Sam the face of contemporary internet media is a stretch, Mr. Beast is probably a more "objectively" correct face if we have to pick one. I will be honest, I think I almost never understand when people discuss ideas in writing at a certain point, like I'm not totally confident that calling media itself something like Baudrillard's hyperreal is even "correct," it's probably more subtle than that but if I continue with that feeling of not understanding an idea and how dare I even write about it, then I don't think I would write anything.
And continuing in that theme of being unsure if I'm understanding what someone has written, I think your final point about transcending a fascination with entertainment and stimulation maybe comes through the creation of art and grounded communication. I might be misunderstanding you. Regardless, you've given me something to think about: is media analysis played out? That's probably correct and I do get the feeling that one should at least attempt to make things, art, whatever, before he offers media analysis. On the other hand I think posting online has added an additional layer to the Baudrillard simulacra (might be because I don't get it): internet posts are far beyond even personalized cable television packages, but "analyzing" this is definitely incredibly masturbatory. And there's a part of me that just hopes you're correct that media analysis is played out, there's a pessimistic part that says it's all that we are even capable of doing anymore: oh you don't care about or want to do media analysis, what are you gonna do, send a newsletter? Who could even read it?
I appreciate your feedback; I think you're a great writer and you're good at communicating ideas. Saying I write pretty well got me excited (which then makes me want to offer "analysis" of the fact that an internet comment has instilled more positive feelings in me than any other human interaction I've had in the last week).
I always found it quite sad that Sam basically build a platform for thousands of pay pigs to watch that garbage all day long, each idiot paying for their chance to post some ret@@ded super chat mocking a contestant. The contestants themselves are likely on the spectrum, Sam and his sycophants push them through a harsher variation of the Stanford prison experiments.
My first sentence in this piece is "Fishtank is not good." It's a money printing machine for Sam and crew with occasional funny moments, typically from Sam. I am not the first to suggest/observe that there seems to be two types of "fans" of Fishtank: fans of Sam and fans of Fishtank. I am a fan of Sam. The real show of Fishtank is reality TV slop and IMO there's an element (from Sam & crew) of if you're a contestant on reality TV and a fan of reality TV then you deserve to suffer (Sam is a bit of a fame whore so you could psychologize that as a form of self-loathing if that's your thing). I dunno how familiar you are with the show, but at the end of season 1 there was a fake-out premature ending of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jpvjgAy2Go where Sam tells the fans to go fuck themselves peppered with real bits of fan behavior like contacting local authorities (for the lulz), typical behavior from terminally online young men losing their minds AKA anyone watching the show. I think there was a lot of truth there, I think Sam really hates young men sending money to say "omg you're so cute, Josie" while at the same time that's really what the show is. Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison experiment performed on test subjects without internet access is relatively "compelling" reality television while at the same time, one would hope not to be compelled by reality television. Sometimes it's funny, which I appreciate.
I saw Sam Hyde and the crew perform stand up last week. Great show, I laughed my sack off, and I have nearly no patience for or interest in stand up comedy or public performance anymore. A personal problem but also a problem in the world.
On the other hand, what that show did bring into stark relief was something missing from my life and likely the lives of many others. Here was a small group of men, working together and independently on a project with verve and muscle that has some, however limited, effect on the larger world. They're doing it unapologetically, without undue deference to contemporary pieties. Their audience knows what they're in for and respects and enjoys what they're doing, and everyone else can find a fainting couch.
And here I am, in utter physical isolation, with my closest male friends hundreds of miles away, and no shared physically rooted patterns or projects, with a digitally based "career" in which I write to a totally incoherent assortment of people, many of whom would most likely disown me if they caught on to some of my political/cultural leanings or if I spoke more frankly in general. I'm not envious of those guys, I don't bring this up to seethe, but only to highlight how rare it is now, and I suspect not just for me, to feel grounded in some kind of brotherhood, to be oriented by a shared purpose with however meager a hope of influencing the larger world, beyond the sad and threadbare consolation of this rinkydink therapeutic artistic expressive practice, hemmed in by apprehensions and insecurities.
You write pretty well. I haven't seen Fish Tank and probably won't. I can barely justify watching Sam Hyde or World Peace, and I don't know if I could spend more time on that kind of material. And this point deserves much more elaboration, and I say it to myself as much as anyone, but I don't know if the Baudrillardian/simulation analytical frame has any salience or power anymore; media analysis seems played out to me, still too dominated by a fascination with entertainment or stimulation that needs to be personally worked out and transcended in concrete and practical ways and not endlessly tweezered and microscoped and repeated.
I also recently saw Sam perform and I thought about including a picture of me in the audience in this article but decided against it. I think my interest in Sam's work might be because I'm very into comedy and I take for granted that others are not as interested in it as I am; maybe calling Sam the face of contemporary internet media is a stretch, Mr. Beast is probably a more "objectively" correct face if we have to pick one. I will be honest, I think I almost never understand when people discuss ideas in writing at a certain point, like I'm not totally confident that calling media itself something like Baudrillard's hyperreal is even "correct," it's probably more subtle than that but if I continue with that feeling of not understanding an idea and how dare I even write about it, then I don't think I would write anything.
And continuing in that theme of being unsure if I'm understanding what someone has written, I think your final point about transcending a fascination with entertainment and stimulation maybe comes through the creation of art and grounded communication. I might be misunderstanding you. Regardless, you've given me something to think about: is media analysis played out? That's probably correct and I do get the feeling that one should at least attempt to make things, art, whatever, before he offers media analysis. On the other hand I think posting online has added an additional layer to the Baudrillard simulacra (might be because I don't get it): internet posts are far beyond even personalized cable television packages, but "analyzing" this is definitely incredibly masturbatory. And there's a part of me that just hopes you're correct that media analysis is played out, there's a pessimistic part that says it's all that we are even capable of doing anymore: oh you don't care about or want to do media analysis, what are you gonna do, send a newsletter? Who could even read it?
I appreciate your feedback; I think you're a great writer and you're good at communicating ideas. Saying I write pretty well got me excited (which then makes me want to offer "analysis" of the fact that an internet comment has instilled more positive feelings in me than any other human interaction I've had in the last week).
I always found it quite sad that Sam basically build a platform for thousands of pay pigs to watch that garbage all day long, each idiot paying for their chance to post some ret@@ded super chat mocking a contestant. The contestants themselves are likely on the spectrum, Sam and his sycophants push them through a harsher variation of the Stanford prison experiments.
My first sentence in this piece is "Fishtank is not good." It's a money printing machine for Sam and crew with occasional funny moments, typically from Sam. I am not the first to suggest/observe that there seems to be two types of "fans" of Fishtank: fans of Sam and fans of Fishtank. I am a fan of Sam. The real show of Fishtank is reality TV slop and IMO there's an element (from Sam & crew) of if you're a contestant on reality TV and a fan of reality TV then you deserve to suffer (Sam is a bit of a fame whore so you could psychologize that as a form of self-loathing if that's your thing). I dunno how familiar you are with the show, but at the end of season 1 there was a fake-out premature ending of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jpvjgAy2Go where Sam tells the fans to go fuck themselves peppered with real bits of fan behavior like contacting local authorities (for the lulz), typical behavior from terminally online young men losing their minds AKA anyone watching the show. I think there was a lot of truth there, I think Sam really hates young men sending money to say "omg you're so cute, Josie" while at the same time that's really what the show is. Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison experiment performed on test subjects without internet access is relatively "compelling" reality television while at the same time, one would hope not to be compelled by reality television. Sometimes it's funny, which I appreciate.