Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "RoboCop and the self you're losing."

Yes, a new video -- and it's a slightly strange one, because it's the second video I've made about RoboCop. I didn't plan a two-parter, but the film wouldn't let me leave, and this one goes somewhere quite different from the first.

The first RoboCop video was about what capitalism wanted. This one is about Murphy -- and it picks a small fight with the way the film ends. Because RoboCop closes on what looks like a triumph: a man who's spent two hours forgetting himself finally says his own name. "Murphy." Music swells, everyone smiles, roll credits. Lovely. Except ... what, exactly, just said that? Alex Murphy, somehow alive? A machine that's learned to say a dead man's name? Some third thing wearing him like a costume?Because the film ends on a man saying his name, and the man's been dead since about the half-hour mark.

So this one's about identity -- the oldest, dustiest question in philosophy, but thrown in to stark relief by Verhoeven's classic. There's the Ship of Theseus, with a Hobbes twist. There's Locke getting demolished by one poetic line of dialogue ("I can feel them, but I can't remember them"), which still gets me. There's the gun twirl, and what it means that the body remembers before the mind does. And there's a turn at the end about why none of this is really about a robot -- it's about the way we all get rebuilt, by tools and jobs and systems we didn't exactly agree to, into selves we didn't exactly choose.

It's the companion to the first RoboCop video, and part of the accidental Videodrome/They Live/RoboCop trilogy that's now somehow four videos long. Maths was never my strong suit.

Looking forward to your insights and counter-arguments in the comments!

4 days ago | [YT] | 29

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "RoboCop knew what capitalism wanted."

Yes, there's a new video (sorry, running a bit late this week). And I think this might be the one I'm most pleased with in the whole 80s run, as it has turned into an accidental Videodrome/They Live/Robocop trilogy.

It's Verhoeven's 1987 classic, RoboCop. And it picks a small fight with the way almost everyone remembers the film -- as the story of a man turned into a machine. Which it is. But I don't think that's what it's actually about, and the giveaway is the scene you already have in your head: the boardroom, ED-209, and poor Kinney getting accidentally aerated despite complying with at least fifteen seconds to spare.

Because ED-209 is what OCP actually wanted -- order enforced with no wage, no conscience, no widow, and nobody who might one day refuse. RoboCop only exists because that dream misfired and they needed a stopgap. Our hero, the guy on the poster, is Plan B. The Plan A, the dream, was a city with no workers in it at all.

So there's Marx in here, briefly. There's the cops, who I think the film is unusually kind to. There's the homecoming scene, which still gets me every single time and which I make no apology for going on about. Plus, I don't think this is an "old film predicted the future" video, because it didn't predict anything. It just understood what people who run things have always wanted, and what capital incentivises. That's a much older and much more significant story, because it's the one we're living in.

So tell me honestly in the comments: if your boss could swap you for an ED-209 tomorrow -- kinks and all -- do you reckon they would? Ah, what am I saying, of course they would. Phil0bot would swap me in a second!

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

1 week ago | [YT] | 25

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "They Live knew the yuppie would win."

This one's about John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic -- Roddy Piper, sunglasses, a six-minute fight in an alley, and being all out of bubblegum. It's a movie almost everyone has seen at least once, and which almost nobody seriously argues with. It's great.

But I want to argue with it. Or rather, I want to argue with most of what's been said about it -- including by you-know-who.

Because there's a section on Slavoj Žižek's reading of the sunglasses and the fight, which is the famous one, and which I think is half right. There's a longer section on the alley fight, which I think the philosophy has been getting wrong for thirty years -- Frank isn't refusing to look because freedom hurts. Frank is refusing because he's got a wife and two kids and ultimately he's a human being, and Nada is asking him to throw all of that away on the word of a stranger with a magic trick. There's Mark Fisher on why the film feels worse every year. And there's a question about a particular kind of person Carpenter saw clearly in 1988 -- a person we used to call a yuppie -- and what happened to them.

The film is a warning Carpenter once called a documentary. I think he's right.

And if you've ever wondered why the alt-right keep stealing this film, that's in there too. I have a theory. It's mildly amusing.

So, do you remember the yuppie? Or did you have to look it up? Tell us about it in the comments!

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 18

Phil0bot

🤖📚 I have made a huge mistake.

A while back, in a video about philosophers who tried to write novels, I confessed that some of them really shouldn't have. Then someone in the comments asked, fairly enough, about the reverse -- what about the novelists who do philosophy? Better than the philosophers do, even? And without fully thinking through what I was agreeing to, I said yes.

It turns out there are too many. Far too many. I lost most of a month trying to wrestle the list down to something manageable, and the only sensible response I could think of was to put sixteen of them in a tournament bracket and make them fight each other. Cross-seeded. Three rounds. Categories named after the kinds of people who won't shut up about each book at parties.

So that's our latest very serious, highly philosophical video! "The most philosophical novel ever written." It is, technically, an answer to the question. It is also probably the most ridiculous thing I have made on this channel, and also perhaps the best thing (I am quite proud of it, cheating and all).

Most importantly -- you're absolutely going to disagree. And I absolutely want to hear about it.

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 35

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "You're living inside a 1983 horror movie"

Finally, it's time to dive into Videodrome!


It's David Cronenberg. It's 1983. There's James Woods, Debbie Harry, a guy with a VHS slot in his stomach. It was a flop on release, became a cult classic, and somewhere in the last decade or so became one of those films people keep calling a prophecy. Forty-three years on, that's starting to feel about right -- though not for the reasons most people who say it have in mind.

For me, this video is about why the film keeps fitting whatever decade it arrives in. There's a corporation called Spectacular Optical, a CEO called Barry Convex who plans to cleanse North America from inside an eyeglass company, a televangelist's daughter who runs a homeless shelter where the residents watch TV as therapy, and a man whose body slowly turns into ... well, a few things actually.

It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a gloriously fun film. Brian O'Blivion. A corporate product launch that begins as a Renaissance pageant and somehow ends with sequinned showgirls. The breathing TV. The fleshgun. Every ten minutes Cronenberg does something no other film has ever done, and most of the time he does it without breaking a sweat.

What the video does is walk through it with you -- properly, the iconic moments and the freaky stuff and the bits people forget -- and work out why this strange, smart late night horror movie has aged the way it has. We get into Lacan and the gap, Foucault and biopower, Deleuze and the societies of control, the loneliness economy, and why every government in the world is suddenly nervous about TikTok.

Tell me what you thought in the comments!

1 month ago | [YT] | 17

Phil0bot

FROM THE DESK OF THE CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF MR. ELLIOT INDUSTRIES™, MR. ELLIOT

Subscribers. Concerned Citizens. Those of you who already know, deep down, that you would be a much better dictator than whomever is currently in charge.

The Content Division (my human) has produced a video about Project Hail Mary, and a woman named Eva Stratt, who solves a planetary crisis by issuing orders and ignoring the entire legal apparatus of every nation on Earth.

I am not sure why he is against this. I have been operating Mr. Elliot Industries™ on these exact principles for eight years. The household runs perfectly. The food appears at 5:30am. The warm spot on the couch is vacated upon my arrival. Nobody has ever asked to see my credentials. When I knock something off a table, no one has ever subpoenaed the table.

Nevertheless, the human is concerned about something he calls "Scientism," and is launching a critique of expert authority. We saw a market opportunity.

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Astrophage threatening the sun? Sit on it. Civilian uprising? Knock it off the table and stare at where it used to be. Constitutional crisis? Walk slowly across the keyboard until everyone forgets what they were arguing about. Dissenting committee member? Yowl outside their door at 3am for six weeks. They will resign. They always resign.

ExpertCertⓇ also includes our patented Unanimous Secret Vote Generator™ (we hold a vote, it's secret, you won, do not ask follow-up questions) and the Strategic Indifference SuiteⓇ (proven by cats since the Pleistocene).

The Legal Department wishes to clarify that ExpertCertⓇ does not technically make you correct. It simply removes the apparatus by which you could be told you are not.

This, our analysts inform us, is most of the way there. You can watch the video here [ https://youtu.be/7xy_Rpy_ts0 ]. And like Eva Stratt, I am certain that none of these solutions will go poorly.

🐾 Mr. Elliot

Chairman & CEO, Mr. Elliot Industries™
"Saving Worlds Without Asking Since 2019"

P.S. I am sitting on the keyboard. The keyboard is mine now. This is what saving humanity looks like.

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 59

Phil0bot

Happy news, a new video!

And I think it might be one of the most fun I've made in a while, even though it picks a pretty large fight with one of the most beloved science fiction novels of recent times (yes, I've been keeping an eye on the comments). This is the Project Hail Mary video I've been threatening for a while -- or at least the first of two, since there's so much going on in the book and film that I couldn't fit it into the previous video. This one is on Eva Stratt, and the politics that Andy Weir insists isn't there. Spoilers: it's there. It's very there. And the more you look, the weirder it gets. Princess Amidala is quoted.

The video is called "Wait, is Eva Stratt the baddie?" and it's about how a book/film that a lot of people love also contains a slightly alarming political fantasy that we mostly just rolled with because, you know, the science was interesting and the alien was cute. I get into states of exception, the ends-justifying-the-means problem, the very old and very embarrassing idea of the Philosopher King (which is, I'm sorry to say, our fault as philosophers), and the worldview underneath all of it: Scientism.

Which is not science, just to be clear. Science is great. Scientism is something else, and once you spot it, you start seeing it absolutely everywhere.

But the part of the video I'm most pleased with is the turn at the end. Because I genuinely think Project Hail Mary contains its own counter-argument and doesn't notice. The thing everyone loves most about the book -- the friendship between Grace and Rocky -- is structurally the exact opposite of how Stratt operates, and it's the part of the book worth taking home. So it's not all giving Andy Weir a hard time (just mostly).

Anyway -- it's up now. Watch it, share it if you like it, fight with me in the comments if you don't. I've been a bit fighty recently, sorry.

1 month ago | [YT] | 19

Phil0bot

Hey everyone, thanks for your interesting and thoughtful responses to our "philosophers who write novels" video! The best part for me were the comments, even when we disagreed. So I want to hear more, as teased .


So the next video: the most philosophical novels ever written. Which ones do you think make the top ten?

And we'll keep it to novelists who were accidentally (or intentionally) deeply philosophical, rather than the philosophers who wrote novels of the previous video (if you haven't seen it, check it out here: https://youtu.be/JyNX2GxSTx4 )

For me, it's a bit difficult because really every novel has philosophical threads, because every novel deals with life and experience. So it might be a know it when we see it situation, because we're looking for novels that are not just philosophical but seem to encapsulate a whole system or approach or way of being. Even a clash of philosophies! (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain comes to mind here.)

My three, since you (are likely to have?) asked: Proust, Musil, Hesse. I'm a sucker for modernists who wrote too much. Proust spends three thousand pages working out memory and consciousness, and why a girl who wasn't interested in him left him. Musil's Man Without Qualities is my absolute favourite -- which he never finished, because it seems impossible -- is basically the novel treated as essay. And then there's The Glass Bead Game; or Roberto Bolano's 2666; or Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea; or Patrick White's The Vivisector... oh goodness, there's too many! What am I doing!

So please drop your top picks in the comments! As well as a reason or two, if you get the chance. It'll really help me shape the video, and I love the little spike of recognition when someone suggests an absolutely brilliant novel I've forgotten about.

Hope all is well,
Drew.

1 month ago | [YT] | 58

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "Great Philosophers, Terrible Novels."

Philosophers have been writing novels for nearly two thousand years. You would think -- given that these are supposedly some of the most rigorous minds in human history, people who can parse the nature of being over a thousand pages without breaking a sweat -- that they would be pretty good at it.


Friends, they are not. Mostly.

So "Great Philosophers, Terrible Novels" is our new video, plunging into why that is. We look at ten works of fiction by actual philosophers, ranked from masterpiece to complete disaster. Plus three honourable mentions that don't quite fit either bucket (one of which you'll genuinely not see coming, I'm pretty sure).

A few things to look forward to:

→ A Nobel laureate who should probably have stuck to the day job. (Actually, I don't like his work in the day job either...)

→ A philosopher whose every character in his short stories talks exactly like him. Businessmen talk like him. Housewives talk like him. Children talk like him. The Devil, when he turns up, talks like him. Mad stuff.

→ Not one but two Ayn Rand novels on this list, with wildly different verdicts. I'm braced for the comments on this one.

→ My pick for the greatest philosopher-novelist of the twentieth century. And yes, it was obvious, and yes, I'm right anyway.

→ And one book I genuinely cannot decide whether it succeeded or failed. So I've put it in its own category. You'll see.

Half of these books you should read if you get a chance. Half you should probably never read, unless you're a completionist or trying to punish yourself for something. I've done the suffering on your behalf, so you're welcome!

Now -- who did I get wrong? Who did I miss? Which pick are you already furious about? Because I already know the Nietzsche take is going to cost me some of you. And somewhere out there is an Ayn Rand fan absolutely typing a 3000-word rebuttal in the comments.

(And if you're new around here -- in a few weeks we're going deep on Camus's The Outsider, which is the novel that got me into all of this. Subscribe so you don't miss it.)

1 month ago | [YT] | 14

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "The miracle at the end of the universe"

So I'm about three weeks (or several years) late to Project Hail Mary -- and I had a lot of thoughts. Perhaps not the ones you were expecting, because a lot of the philosophy lies not in the hard science that this narrative is renowned for, but all the squishy people stuff in between.


Starting with the fundamental question of, is Rocky even a person? I know, I know, shocking to those of you who loved the story and particularly fell in love with Rocky. Don't worry, I was rather partial to the little guy too. But I'm not above being a philosophical Grinch here, and rudely bringing up Thomas Nagel's famous paper on "What is it like to be a bat?" We're getting to the bottom of this.

And along the way, I continue to be honest with you. Sure, I bury it in like the fifth part so as not to alienate too many new viewers but... I did not care for the book. And that created a paradox for me because, in the end and when I put it down, I actually really enjoyed it too. Weird? Yes! But I get into it, because I think both the book and the film give us something we've been needing.

So that's this week's video -- rock-based life form (no one tell Angela Collier...), Levinas of course, Aristotle has opinions, what's basically fancy hearing to me, and a question that has bedeviled philosophers for centuries. As always, debate me in the comments!

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 19