A rant about boobs, I guess?

So, I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing this person or their comment. But I didn’t know how to respond to it without just writing a whole post about it because this is stuff that I think about every waking second of every day.

So here goes. I got the following comment on my “You Don’t Scare Me” video, which I’ll put at the bottom of this post in case you haven’t seen it for some reason.

There’s a lot to this comment, and it’s nothing I haven’t heard before – I was advised not to post this video by several people with similar concerns, and I didn’t even ask my family for their input before posting because, well… there are obvious concerns to be had because, yeah, it’s possible that this video will invite more unwanted attention, but here’s… okay, there are a few things to say, here, actually.

“The Society of the Spectacle”

I’m working on a video about this book, written by Guy Debord & published in 1967. The Kindle translation I have isn’t as good as the Audible translation, so I was going to type up some quotes/notes on the Audible version so I can compare the two more easily, since comparing two translations is often a lot more, uh, elucidating. I couldn’t think of a word that sounded less pretentious. Anyway. I figured, why not share it with you? So.

1. The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail, presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

2. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images of the world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.

3. The Spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated, and precisely for that reason, this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness. The unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation.

4. The spectacle is not a collection of images. Rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

I just find this picture of Debord amusing…

Okay. That’s enough for now, because that’s where things start getting more complicated. This is a good place to start, because there’s already quite a bit to unpack. I had a professor once who had us rephrase philosophy passages in the simplest terms possible to help us understand them better, which I always found really helpful, so here’s my attempt with these ones:

1. The media is at the center of modern life. Instead of living life for ourselves, we watch movies and TV shows about life.
2. The Spectacle (media/movies/TV/books/etc) chips off a piece of many different ways/aspects of real life and presents itself as the real thing. This new homogenized reality turns us into passive viewers of the version of life it presents to us.
   1. The second two sentences here are tricky, I’m not quite sure but I’ll give it a shot..
      1. These representations of life take on a life of their own… and begin to believe in their own validity.
      2. The spectacle prioritizes the general over the individual, which turns individuals into zombies whose real lives are lived in service of the spectacle, which is imaginary.
   2. It’s kind of hard because I feel like you could write a book just about what he means by “the spectacle” exactly, but imagine, like, corporations where the real people sacrifice their actual lives to this bigger idea of the corporation that doesn’t actually exist, and so the corporation, which isn’t alive, takes on a life of its own by siphoning life from the living people who compose it.
3. The spectacle (for simplification purposes, let’s just say the media) – presents itself as both a part of society and all there is of society – as the means by which the different veins of social life become unified. But because it isn’t really society, but rather a sort of fun-house mirror that allows society to watch itself, the unification it purports to create is a lie.
4. The spectacle isn’t just the amalgamation of all media (it isn’t a list of all the shows on Netflix and Hulu, all the videos on YouTube, etc., it’s the means by which those things mediate our relationships to each other on both the individual and the collective levels.

So this is kind of going to be the cornerstone, I think, for me, in thinking about the philosophy of the media, and I hope you can kind of see why. Because what’s completely bananas, is this dude wrote all of this before the internet even existed. Social media wasn’t even a thing – he was JUST talking about, like, cable news and sitcoms at the time.

The Internet is Bananas.

Self-publishing is such a bizarre ability that used to not really even be a thing. If you wanted to broadcast your thoughts you had to get on a stage or just… be really loud?

But now we can all self-publish anything, any time, and that is pretty crazy. Social media makes it so we all are celebrities, kind of – we’re all constantly presenting ourselves to each other in a packaged form.

It’s why Facebook drove me crazy in high school… oh boy we’re about to get way too personal. But is that not what I do best?

Okay. Blogging.

I’ve been learning a lot. I’ve been feeling like I, uh… I guess I feel like I don’t really fit anywhere. I tried getting behind a microphone, and that didn’t work. I tried working retail again, and that didn’t work. I tried YouTube, but now that I have a shot at making that work, I’m too afraid and insecure to make it work, probably.

I just, I’ve written myself into a corner. On the one hand, I have… something. A uniqueness, I guess.

Whatever my YouTube stuff has been so far, it’s… its own thing, I feel. But the problem with that is, I have no idea where I fit. Am I a “Philosophy YouTuber” and if so, how could I possibly even hope to compete with the incredible philosophy content that already exists? And if not, why bother with the philosophy stuff at all? But for me the philosophy stuff is the point of the channel.

“There’s no such thing as angels, but there are people who might as well be…”

This is a blog, and the point of a blog is to overshare in a way that’s interesting/compelling, right?

Which means this is a safe place for me to just be me, right?

Ideally, maybe, but it sure doesn’t feel that way, anymore. Maybe because I’m too young to understand the difference between awkwardness and true dumbassitude. 

(Shakespeare invented words, too, don’t tell me how to live my life! …says the girl trying to figure out how she got so crazy that she can’t even tell which of HER OWN voices is really her, anymore.)

Anyway but maybe we all have a multitude of voices so the part that’s weird is just admitting to it in the wrong spaces. But we have so many new, bizarre spaces in which to communicate, now. It’s not easy to figure out how to do that effectively on every possible scale. It’s not easy to realize that the simulated world and the real world are one and the same.

It’s just, I feel like I need to explain myself to every person I meet but I don’t have time to go over the whole thing that many times. So I started a YouTube channel where you can see the whole picture, if you really want to. But I neglected real life, in the process. Partly because I’m just not very good at real life.

I guess I have a blog, now.

A blog in progress, in any case.I have this problem where I can’t sleep at night so I ramble on twitter or text message or wherever just to try to get the thoughts out of my head so I can sleep. And yes, I journal, but there’s something about having at least the idea of someone else reading what you write that… I’ve always been a little preoccupied with, even in my earliest journals.