Did you not read the-- ah.
There are two kinds of people in this world,
people who clicked to watch this video and people who didn't.
And within those two groups, countless subgroups,
email clickers, subbox clickers, Twitter
and the Reddit clickers, non-clickers
who were simply following directions,
and non-clickers aware of the obvious ploy to get clicks.
And so a simple binary turns into a rainbow
of complex relationships involving many people who
at this point have correctly guessed
that this episode of Idea Channel
is about r/thebutton, a subreddit with a button.
Next to the button, a timer.
It counts down from one minute.
When one presses the button, which one can only
do once and only if their account was
made before April 1 of this year, the timer is reset.
The presser is awarded flair.
We need to talk about your flair.
A colored badge indicating where in the countdown
their press occurred.
Flair indicating high count presses are common.
Flair indicating low count presses, rarer.
I am a non-presser.
As a Grey Hopeful, it is my belief
that non-pressers ultimately will reap the greatest reward.
Though, I don't believe that reward will be Reddit Gold,
rather the simple joy of knowing one
has resisted the awful, earthly delight
of pressing-- hm, filthy.
Which brings us back to the community rainbow.
There are pressers and non, but within those, large taxonomies
of inspirations for either.
Did you press to keep the counter from hitting zero?
Did you wait to press, hoping for low count flair,
but you were too late and got purple?
Are you a hitchhiker?
Do you not press because you find the prepress
moment more alluring than the press itself could ever be?
Or have you not pressed because, up until this moment,
you didn't even know the damned button even existed.
Agh.
The freedom of innocence.
Button groups, like all groups, organized
by inspiration, faith, name, time, color, expertise,
and intention, which we're going to talk more
about in a couple minutes.
There are also lookers on, speculating as
to the motivations for it all.
John Patrick Pullen at Time wrote
about The Button's mystery.
What happens when you push it or if no one does?
Like Lost, one is invited to speculate
as to what's really going on.
Fruzsina Eordogh for TouchVision relates the hypothesis
that technologically supported stratification taps
into human nature.
People like to get tribal, says a quoted Redditor
responsible for crunching Button data.
Scott Beggs at Film School Rejects
talks about storytelling.
And Greg Stevens at the Daily Dot
calls the button a video game, specifically
a massively multiplayer online video game.
I wonder about the ramifications of this.
If the button is a video game, where
does that leave things like Flow, Gone Home, or The Lonely
Wizard, where Dear Esther contains lots of video
but, arguably, not much game.
Is The Button the reverse, but are both equally video game?
Stevens's video game argument is compelling,
but ultimately I award it none stars.
To me Dear Esther is a video game and the button is not.
I agree that there is massiveness
and multiple players.
It is clearly online, and even, I would say, a type of game.
But I don't think pressing or not pressing
The Button itself is a game.
And the whole thing is really no more video than, say, a PDF.
If anything, The Button reminds me
of old, text-only multi-user dungeons
that I used to play as a wee sorcerer.
The directive there was to make a character,
behave like that character around other players,
and, I mean, not much else, really.
Not, if you didn't want to.
The Button is both less and more complicated than a MUD.
It is a massively, multiplayer, online,
RPG whose mechanics are The Button, but also, Reddit
and all related technologies.
It's for all intents and purposes, a community written
multi-user dungeon with classes, lore, history, factions, even
loot, just with no dungeons.
It is a giant, collaborative story,
where each player gets one very important, optional dice roll.
As of writing, there are more than 20 major groups
circling The Button.
And there's nothing preventing more.
Which-- I mean, this shouldn't be surprising.
Collaboratively built lore, role play
to storytelling, community myth making
around some shared experience of a piece of technology.
It's all par for the internet course.
There's the fanaticism of the PC master race
and followers of Lord Gaben.
There was Inglip who communicated
with his acolytes via CAPTCHA.
One of the most interesting and important parts of Twitch Plays
Pokemon were the religions of the Helix Fossil and Bird
Jesus.
There's Lil B the Based God.
And who can forget our lord and savior,
the Flying Spaghetti Monster, may you
be touched by his noodley appendage.
Kate Knibbs over at Gizmodo talks
about the often blurry line between fandoms
and, what she calls, online microreligions,
which I do think is distinct from our treatment of fandoms,
religion, and Doctor Who.
This is all explicitly religious, purposeful,
even if it's perotic.
And I mean, why not?
The externalization of our individual subjectivities
as deities or moral and ethical systems
is attractive, even if it's ironic.
It can be fun and entertaining, guiding, or comforting.
It can help us find friends and identify opposition.
Difference, even that manufactured over something
like colored subreddit flair lays the foundation for stories
that we can tell together, #internet.
#everything.
# animated 3yfe And probably lost on no one is the fact that
most of these online microreligions arise from sites
known for their atheistic leanings.
Worship and its practices, like the rest of culture,
can, should be, and are available for modern
and particularly internet styles of remix
and recontextualization.
Which brings us back, I think, to mystery and also intention.
What gets people in the door or, hovering over the button,
I guess, is the mystery of the whole thing.
There's a button, and it has a lock on it.
What?
But what keeps them there, again, I would guess,
is the meaning made from that mystery and other people's
attitudes towards it plus the ability
to perceive and join in with a kind of shared intentionality--
people with the same or different, but attractive,
attitudes towards that mystery.
Belief systems step in amongst many other places
where currently existing systems can't, don't, or, in the eyes
of believers, don't sufficiently explain the universe
and how it works.
The joke of the Helix Fossil, The Button, and Inglip
is that some programmatically determined thing
must be divine.
It is wholly deterministic, yet practically unknowable,
so it must be transcendent.
LOL.
And so related, shared intentionalities, and beliefs
that certain actions further or support those intentions arise
out of those conclusions.
But, OK.
Here is where the problem arises.
In the same way we have to call things with an arguable video
gameness, video games, if we want
to call The Button a video game, must we
say weird things about religions if we call
The Button religions an RPG?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
By which I mean, if we're calling a group of people
acting with a shared intentionality
against a perceived, possibly immaterial, threat a game,
are we also calling the religion a game?
A possible response here is that in games we perform,
whereas in worship we act sincerely.
We have sincere beliefs that our actions
are forwarding our intentions.
But man, that seems like a sliding scale, doesn't it?
Like what is true sincerity?
And how much is enough?
And surely, there are religious people
and the non who are less and more sincere in there acted
upon intentions, either ironic or absolutely earnest,
than their peers, the devout simply going
through the motions or an ironic performer finding true meaning
and purpose, possibly after having clicked a button.
Or not.
What do you guys think?
I am not going to ask you a direct question,
but just trust that you will be able to sort yourselves
into a rainbow of communities based upon Idea Channel lore,
and decide what thing is most pertinent to discuss
at this moment.
Let me know what it is in the comments.
Don't get too mad at each other.
Remember, we're all friends here.
I just flew in from Phoenix and, boy, am I just generally very
tired because my flight was delayed 30 hours,
and I haven't slept in a very long time.
Phoenix Comicon was so much fun.
Thank you to everybody who came to meet up at the Deuce
and hung out with me, Jamen and Joe.
Thank you to everybody who came to the PBS DS D&D Q&A TM,
where I saw my first ever D&D group hug,
which was tons of fun.
Thanks to everyone who came up and said,
hey, everybody who I met for the first time, everybody
who I saw again from last year's Phoenix Comicon.
It was just an all around blasts.
That is until weather, two broken planes,
and a million other things conspired
to stop me from leaving Phoenix for an extended amount of time.
So for a bunch of reasons, all of them silly, but none of them
avoidable, there are going to be no comment responses this week.
So if we can get comment responses
for the Do We Live In The Future Episode out as their own video
by the end of week, we might do that.
Otherwise, we'll probably attach them somehow.
We'll do double comment responses next week.
So, yeah, I'm really sorry.
It pains me to have to do this.
But I'm shooting this hours before the episode
is supposed to go up.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to go sleep for a little bit.
So I will see everyone after that.
And if you want to know where this guy came from,
I'm going to put a link in the description.
Aleeza from Sushi You Can Hug made it.
She's a friend of the show.
And she makes awesome, awesome stuff.
So you should check her out.
I'm going to go use the rock as a pillow now.
Bye.