Jacob Geller (.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0K2DnI1TDk
My daughter has trouble finding things to do that aren’t on screens. When I tell her TV time is over she cries and wails. She doesn’t like to play by herself and insists I play imagination games with her. I understand. What else has she known? Computers and YouTube interact with her, play with her, often in ways I could never, whether because I don’t have the time or the literal capacity to do so.
Isn’t this the appeal of media? Since pen first hit paper, haven’t people preferred to read, or to hear the old masterworks than to put in the effort to make their own stories? Don’t children need lullabies?
Does mass media affect our capacity to desire? Does the screen make the experience less real, less fulfilling?
Baudrillard. The real becomes a simulacra, a simulation, hyperreality supersedes the materially real. Does the materially real lose its meaning?
I don’t think so. I don’t think Geller does either. And that’s his concern - that the empty room (simulation) cannot replace material reality, but that it threatens to close off our access to it.
Media isn’t going anywhere. And it shouldn’t. Perhaps it’s hyperbolic of Geller to claim that the future takes this shape - though it’s a compelling thought, it most accurately describes a permanent COVID culture, one of absolute isolation. Nonetheless, the point of the video - and perhaps of this style of essay - is to provoke a feeling, a curiosity about what could be. It invokes the feeling of isolation, published in a time when fascism is taking lives in America. Totalitarianism relies on isolation, on tearing communities apart.
The solution to isolation is the same as the solution to totalitarianism. It’s community. Surprising how often public ailments find their roots in antisocial ideologies. Ideologies of absolute selfishness, of neoliberal marketeerism, of rugged individualism.
Ironically I write this alone in my apartment. I don’t go out much. I’m too shy to DM anybody, to talk in Discord chats or promote my projects. I suppose I’m afraid of getting hurt. Afraid of criticism that would actually disengage me from my predisposed beliefs. But that is the seed of fascism in me. One which must be stomped out. That is the seed my father placed in me, of great man theory, of the study of money and power for their own sakes, that Machiavellian game. I still struggle to stomp it out. I still struggle to dissolve myself.
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