Don’t Believe the Hype + Phetasy Digest
Civil War 2.0 | Life is a Dumpster Fire | Unboxing the YouTube Award | Factory Settings is back, baby! | Michael Shermer Talks Truth | Looking Back on 20 Years of Phetasy | Groypers So Ghey
This tweet summed up the radical weirdness of our current reality:
This has been the general confusion all week in our writers’ meetings and group chats. It’s hard to tell which way is up anymore. You can hear it in Bridget’s voice on this week’s Walk-Ins Welcome and both Dumpster Fire episodes.
One of my favorite philosophers is Guy Debord. He was a French Marxist, but other than that, his ideas are fantastic. His big notion is Spectacle. A kind of social lie we all accept, like the notion that a career politician would actually mean what they say while asking us to look past their corruption.
Debord is best known for his book Society of the Spectacle, but parts of it are near unreadable, and if you’re curious for more, I recommend his follow-up Notes on the Society of the Spectacle. The former is stanky with beautifully written Commie slop.
He argues that the most intimate expressions of human meaning are reduced to spectacle, but spectacle, unlike any that Debord could have imagined. Spectacle fuels the sense of a world that hardly makes sense: “In a world which really is topsy-turvy,” he writes, “the true is a moment of the false. That’s a pretty good characterization of the world we’re living in: “In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others,” he writes, “every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality.”
Nobody actually believes the spectacle, but we all play along, often unaware that we are alone in this realization. But that’s not true. And all the cynicism in the world can’t fool us into believing that life itself has lost the plot.
Stay safe out there, Pham. And don’t doubt yourself. As Bridget put it on Tuesday’s Dumpster Fire: We’ve got to keep our eyes on the most principled people in America, the ones who see truth through all the spectacle.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #283
Is Minnesota Ground Zero for Civil War 2?
Minnesota is apparently Ground Zero for the start of Civil War 2. How many times must I ask you all to stop murdering so we can get back to jokes?
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #375
How to Find Truth When Everything Feels Fake - Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer returns for a fascinating conversation about the crisis of truth in our polarized, AI-driven world. He and Bridget discuss the fate of print magazines, shrinking attention spans, the challenges of discerning reality amid deepfakes, misinformation, and Shermer’s new book Truth: What It Is, How To Find It, and Why It Still Matters.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #284
Unboxing Our 100k YouTube Award!
Unboxing our 100k YouTube Award! We reminisce about the long slow road to 100k and the history of Dumpster Fire.
FACTORY SETTINGS - EPISODE #62
20 Years of Phetasy
Factory Settings is back, baby! Maggie left on the 20th anniversary of Phetasy. Damn. So many funny moments in this episode. So many tender, thoughtful, insightful, electrifying moments. Jeren thinks the Dumpster Fire writers’ room is a support group. (It definitely is lol.)
Episode drops tomorrow :)
THE SPECTATOR
Meet the male Kardashians
What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.
“One of my favorite philosophers is Guy Debord. He was a French Marxist, but other than that, his ideas are fantastic.”
Thing is, everyone in France was a Marxist at some point in their lives. So don’t hold that that against Guy.