Here's an idea, and
perhaps an unsurprising one,
the internet is absurd.
This is my favorite image macro.
It's a demotivator.
There's a giraffe
pointing at a duck.
And it says, look at this duck.
I am a giraffe.
It's just, I mean, how
did that duck get there?
Why is that giraffe doing that?
Who took the picture?
Who put the caption on it?
And why is it so funny?
There's just something
particularly internet
about the whole thing.
And here we'll
pause to acknowledge
that when I say particularly
internet, I mean specifically,
particularly, Western internet,
given my experience of it.
My mother or someone
from China or Chile
might have a very
different sense
of what constitutes
particular internetness.
For me, it's a kind
of context collapse,
several things together
that until they meet,
you would never guess could
exist in harmony or, I guess,
harmony.
YouTube poops, mashups, so many
funny memes, and by extension,
things which have inspired
and parroted them,
like advertisements,
music videos, sitcoms,
have all led to an
increase, in my eyes,
in the prevalence of
absurdity in popular culture,
a creative tactic
where something
is made meaningless
or irrational
on purpose so as
to appear silly.
MAN: Goozem doozem.
A very recent example,
and what will perhaps
remain in the pantheon
of absurd media,
is Adult Swim's Too Many Cooks,
which if you haven't seen it,
defies quick summary.
So you should just go
ahead and watch it.
But a word of warning,
there is some fake gore
and a partially topless woman.
So just make sure that your
grandmother, your boss,
or your boss's grandmother
are not in the room.
Now Too Many Cooks
creator Casper Kelly,
also co-creator
of the Adult Swim
show Your Pretty Face
is Going to Hell,
has described his own style
as absurdist and dark,
according to
Entertainment Weekly.
And surely, it is one
type of absurd constructed
to produce
disjunction, seemingly
irrational, nonsensical,
but still somehow cohesive.
But I think there's another
kind of absurd at work
here, specifically an example
of Albert Camus' absurdism.
In his essay The Myth
of Sisyphus, Camus
sets up an unsettling dichotomy.
The world, on one
hand, is meaningless.
Nobody exists on purpose.
Nobody belongs anywhere.
Everybody's going to die.
At the heart of
all beauty, Camus
writes, lies something inhuman.
And these hills, the softness
of the sky, the outline
of these trees, at
this very minute,
lose the illusionary meaning
with which we had them clothed,
Henceforth, more remote
than a lost paradise.
But regardless of the
absence of this meaning,
people are always searching for
it, even though it's not there.
Ultimately, any meaning or
reason that we see in the world
is simply ours.
It is not the world's.
"No code of ethics, no effort
are justifiable a priori
in the face of the
cruel mathematics that
command our
condition", Camus wrote
before downing his
espresso and taking
a long drag on his cigarette
as his eyes scanned the ocean's
horizon for any speck of
meaning that he knows truly
will never appear.
Absurdism is born
from the relationship
between humanity's
constant search for meaning
and the universes
complete lack of any.
Camus compares modern life to
Sisyphus in the Greek myth,
rolling a boulder up a hill
only to have it roll back down
again for eternity.
Likewise, we perform our
mundane tasks, life, job,
over and over and over.
Both us and Sisyphus can only
find meaning, contentedness,
in admitting that this is what
life is, repetitive and absurd.
So you just grin, bear it,
and you roll your boulder.
It's convenient then that Too
Many Cooks is mostly a send up
of late '80s,
early '90s sitcoms,
shows like Family Matters,
Full House, Family Ties,
The Cosby Show, all highly
moralistic and hinging
on the idea that each family
member and their actions are
meaningful, that in life,
there is success, purpose,
and reason.
And all these shows reuse tropes
to that end in the same way
that Sisyphus pushes his boulder
over and over and over and over
and over, a fact echoed
sort of by Too Many Cooks
use of repetition.
That is, until things
start going awry.
The cast members go about
their posing, chyron adorned,
until the point at which
the antagonist, looking
sort of like if you
were to cast Slavoj
Zizek as the creepy
uncle, starts
slaughtering them, crumbling
setting and context
and reaching peak absurdity
with chyron people adorned
with screaming people chyrons.
Too Many Cooks reads, to me, not
as an illustration of absurdism
but maybe as a kind of
warning against failing
to acknowledge it.
Uncle Zizek is a
dispassionate force,
acting without clear reason.
And the cast members feel
safe in their meaningful roles
until the universe shows them
that otherwise is the case.
But once they're shown
the constructed nature
of their world, it's
already too late.
The happily manufactured sitcom
broth is already spoiled.
Now look.
SINGERS (ON TV): Stew, pinch
of salt and laughter too.
Too Many Cooks
also has elements
of the theater of the
absurd, a genre of stage play
inspired by Camus' writing,
repetition, of course,
characters stuck in awful
situations, ironic overuse
of tropes and cliches.
I know there are
some awesome theater
nerds who watch Idea Channel.
So if you all are
inspired, I would
love to hear what
you think about this,
because to wrap
things up, I want
to talk about Alex from Target.
If you missed it,
Alex is a teenager
who works at a Target in Texas.
A picture of him made its
way to Twitter and around.
And in no time flat, he had
hundreds of thousands of fans
for, if you are
an old, no reason.
The whole thing
culminated with Alex
taking a trip to meet Ellen
and a PR firm claiming,
falsely it seems, to have
engineered his success
from the ground up.
Much like has been the case
with Too Many Cooks, the Alex
from Target think pieces
rained down upon the masses.
But six days later, at
the time of shooting,
it's kind of all quiet
on the Alex from Target
front, meaningful one
day, mundane the next.
And maybe eight days from
now, when this video goes up,
Too Many Cooks will be the same.
Maybe not.
Maybe it'll experience some
version of what we talked about
in our old memes video.
To put it in terms that the late
'90s rock band Failure might,
perhaps Too Many Cooks will play
itself to death in all of us.
Guitar riff.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Either way, Alex from Target,
TwitchPlaysPokemon, Kony
2012, and maybe Too Many Cooks,
we'll see, there definitely
seems to be this repeated
process of intense infatuation,
followed by critical
response, followed by,
hey, what's next in line?
Camus named Don Juan as
an example of ideal living
in the face of absurdism.
Don Juan recognized that true
love is, in fact, meaningless
and so chose to experience
as much passionate love as
possible.
I don't know that I am
entirely on board with that.
But what Camus wrote
was, what counts
is not the best living
but the most living.
So maybe that's us, cultural
Don Juans or media Sisyphuses,
rolling our absurd
digital boulder
only to watch it fall and
then return for it again,
complacent in its absurdity
and so, at the very least,
entertained.
Rolling, rolling, rolling.
What do you guys think?
Does absurdism
arise in our search
for meaning in things like Too
Many Cooks or Alex from Target?
Let us know in the comments.
And there is no
meaning in subscribing.
So just don't-- don't bother.
Pensive ocean look.
[SEAGULLS SQUAWKING]
[WAVES CRASHING]
Where of one cannot speak,
one should just comment first.
Let's see what you had to
say about hell and quoting
other people.
Let me tell you, Zgames,
hell is also only
being able to choose six or
seven comments to respond to.
So I feel your pain, or
at least a version of it.
[INAUDIBLE] hopes that
we might eventually
do more about Wittgenstein,
maybe include some stuff
from Russell or Popper.
And these are things
that I would love to do.
I would also just
love, in general,
to talk more about
analytic philosophy.
Um, I've also been
thinking lately
about how much fun it would be
to do an episode format that's
like idea people, where
we do maybe biographies
and explanations of some of the
ideas from famous idea havers.
I would really love to do an
episode about Leon Theremin
and just in general
have an excuse
to talk excitedly about
people that I really like.
Is that a thing that
you would watch?
Would you watch that?
Minimus32, who is writing a
dissertation on Wittgenstein's
relationship to zen to
Buddhism, that sounds cool,
provides an additional take
on the seventh proposition
in his Tractatus and says
that it is also kind of about,
or-- or ultimately
about how if thought
needs to somehow contain
words, that he is also
saying that there
are limits to what
is even thinkable and
therefore sayable.
So this, yeah, this
was a great comment.
Links to this one and all
the others in the doobly doo.
Edwardo Gonzalez talks about
the problem of translation
when trying to interpret
the works of philosophers
and gives a perspective
from the Spanish translation
of the cogito, which is
I think and then I am,
which sort of erases some
of the dependency of I
think therefore I am.
And yeah, I mean, Nietzsche
suggested I think it was,
um, um, it thinks as a, as
an alternative to the cogito.
And Ikasan gives this sort
of a similar perspective
from the Buddhist side
of things and talks
about an Alan Watts quote,
which is a great one,
about how the
perception of self is
kind of audience and actor
collapsed into one thing.
The cogito.
The cogito.
The cogito.
Dia Leventhal offers some
clarifications and additions
and first talks
about how Descartes
was coming at his
skepticism trying
to prove that everything
exists as a result
of some benevolent god.
And that's a very important
piece of context for thinking
about I think therefore I am.
He also talks about
Wittgenstein's response to hell
is other people, which is, um,
that hell is not other people.
Hell is yourself, which is
very much in keeping with how
Wittgenstein thought
about the way
that we create meaning
and the problems
with shuttling it back and forth
between-- between personalities
and people in the world, and
then finally, the important
point that the
Tractatus is generally
considered part of
Wittgenstein's early work,
which is really different
from his later work.
And there were a couple people
recommending in the comments
to also check out, if you're
interested in Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations,
which, hey, I agree.
It's great.
[INAUDIBLE] talks about
PMS Hacker's observation
that Wittgenstein didn't see
concepts as things floating out
in the world to be
discovered but rather ways
for us to use that language
to sort of crystallize
and generate that meaning
and makes some really
great points and then goes
on to suggest that maybe we
should print I exist badges.
And this-- I like
this idea of a badge
also being a thing that
brings someone into existence,
like, boop, you exist.
I'm gonna think about this.
And finally, Hogmagundi asks
the really good question
of how hell is other people
might change in light
of the internet and
anonymity and works
through some of the possible
answers to that question.
I really love this
question and kind of maybe
agree with the final thing
that Hogmagundi gets to, which
is that hell is still other
people just maybe kind
of in a different way.
We have a Facebook, an
IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
The tweet of the
week comes from 2UFB,
who points us towards a research
paper from a mathematician who
has proven why
hipsters tend to make
the same stylistic choices.
And I just want to read
part of the abstract here.
"When hipsters are too slow
in detecting the trends,
they will keep making
the same choices
and therefore remain
correlated as time
goes by while their
trend evolves in time
as a periodic function."
All right.
And finally, this week's
episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these cooks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TOO MANY COOKS THEME
SONG: It takes a lot
to make a stew, a pinch
of salt and laughter
too, a scoop of kids to add
the spice, a dash of love
to make it nice.
And you've got too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many cooks.
Too many, too many cooks
will spoil the broth.
But they'll fill our hearts
with so much, so much love.
Too many cooks!
