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.
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, too many cooks will spoil the broth.
But they'll fill our hearts with so much, so much love.
Too many cooks!