Death Driving on the Youtube Shorts Highway
ARLO O’BLANEY
What Marcel Duchamp’s readymades did to art, Twitter has done to the sentence, Instagram to the image, and YouTube and TikTok to the video. With the democratization of these forms came the disappearance of their content. Now, anything can be turned into entertainment. And once everything is entertainment, nothing is truly entertaining. Nothingness itself begins to entertain us.
But prior to the ubiquity in popular entertainment of nothingness, of “content without content,” this appetite was identified and catered to in modern art. Since the first claims of art’s uselessness, “art for art’s sake,” in the 19th century, one could already detect an affinity with entertainment, an equally self-serving formula: entertainment for entertainment’s sake. If aesthetic pleasure is a worthy end-in-itself, then the more vulgar pleasure of mass entertainment can likewise be considered so as well. Yet uselessness does not instantly imply meaninglessness. Developments had to occur in order for art to not only revel in its uselessness, but to be liberated from the obligation of carrying meaning. Jean Baudrillard identifies Duchamp’s works as the major logical turn toward this principle of uselessness:
Extending this principle, it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art. This is precisely what the "readymade" does, when it simply withdraws an object from its function, without changing it in any way, and thereby turns it into a gallery piece. It is enough to turn the real itself into a useless function to make it an art object, prey to the devouring aesthetic of banality.
By doing so, art could then assimilate any object, hence the new possibility that an incidental hole in the wall could be viewed as a part of the exhibit, that now museums and galleries are filled with traps in which the viewer fails to identify where the art ends and the museum begins. This experience is in a sense correct, for now that anything can become art, the aesthetics once limited to art’s domain flow out of the museum and gallery and flatten across reality. Baudrillard described this process as transaesthetics, in which the liberation of art from aristocratic forms constituted a democratization not on the side of the viewer, but the art-object itself:
That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame.
The end result is precisely that the average museum-goer is just as pleased to look at the museum’s website design as they are the view of the city it offers, as they are its architecture, as they are its elevator, as they are its works. The illusion of art’s transcendence has been lifted, it is an object just like any other, and an object that particularly revels in its uselessness. The Modernists might have been faced with the loss of the sacred, but still they attempted to attain transcendence through a belief in history, a history of progress. Now, however, any idea of transcendence has been abandoned, and art instead conveys the emptiness of a society that no longer has art or religion to look toward as a source of meaning. In this sense, art is by no means made superfluous by the release of aesthetics into everyday life, for since it is from art that these aesthetics have been dispersed, art now communicates to us as a memory of what was lost, as an absence, the lack and nothingness that defines our current moment. Baudrillard again: “It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there's no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity.”
If there has long been an exchange between ‘high art’ and mass entertainment (even if the line between the two is hazy), with the innovations of the former trickling to the latter, then it is no surprise that through a similar process, we live in a time of transentertainment. The ability for anyone to produce media across these various platforms has liberated entertainment from its previously restricted domain, ensuring that now any object can be made a source of entertainment by anyone, and receive its ‘fifteen minutes of fame’. The cost of this democratization is that entertainment itself becomes increasingly banal and lacking. It is as if entertainment-value is a scarce asset that has now been violently stretched to include every aspect of our life. If art takes garbage as its object, at least this detritus illustrates a nothingness which we’re confronted with in our everyday life as well. But when this love of waste is employed in the production of mass entertainment, the audience is expected to gain entertainment-pleasure from that which has now been stretched too thin. Art might provoke an intellectual scramble by putting forth nothingness as its object, regardless of whether we get it, or if there’s even anything to get, but entertainment that puts forth such a nothingness offers only dissatisfaction, the paradox of having one’s attention captured but not one’s interest. Nothingness is not said here for dramatic effect, it is not that mass culture has decayed into slop: slop has long existed and been enjoyed. But the slop of entertainment today goes beyond banality into nothingness. Just as one walks through a contemporary art gallery, not exactly sure if they ‘get it,’ one now scrolls and consumes while unsure of what exactly it is that they are getting out of it: for it is not pleasure, it is not knowledge, it seems nothing is received in return for time spent.
The difference between the democratization of art-objects and entertainment-objects is that people don’t get addicted to art. The goal of the mindless scroll is clearly some type of pleasure or satisfaction: it is relaxing, one is giving themselves a little treat of down time. But rarely does this pleasure appear, and yet it is repeated, over and over. If pleasure appears at any point, it does not mark the end of our scroll but only fuels further consumption, until we find ourselves actively not enjoying it, not only bored, but even stressed at our inability to bring things to an end. Freud defined pleasure as the release of excitations, and yet often we find that the scroll has resulted in the opposite: a raising of tension, which places the infinite scroll beyond the pleasure principle. It is likely for this very reason that dopamine has gained such widespread use in our vocabulary: when we can no longer reference pleasure as our driving force, we must instead speak in biochemical terms which abstract experience so far as to remove it from the equation. As a result, we define ourselves as dopamine-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking, we define our motivation as the release of the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation, a tautology that eliminates the subjective experience of pleasure in lieu of describing objective chemical processes. Objectively the scroll is hedonistic, subjectively it is a manifestation of the death drive, raising of tension and eliminating the possibility of satisfaction.
This behavior in which we exchange our attention for seemingly nothing in return but regret takes us into the domain of Georges Bataille’s general economy. Here, life itself is destined to expend energy beyond reason and any concept of utility:
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
This point at which an organism (or society) can no longer reinvest its surplus back into growth is perpetually reached. For Bataille, it is precisely in the expenditure of this excess, in luxury or catastrophe, that humanity gains its humanness. A life of pure utility and function is one of survival, of machines—it lacks any substance or meaning. Our human qualities instead enter into the equation through luxury and leisure, rather than productivity. A society is in this way defined by how it wastes.
For much of history, a society’s expenditure would serve an important symbolic function, returning no material goods, but rather a sense of the sacred, and a meaning to things. It would be an extremely odd thing for such self-destructive sacrifices of resources to ever develop in societies if they did not serve some function of maintaining an equilibrium beyond the material level. The sacrifices of the Aztecs would require a squandering of immense resources and lives, but in return, the society felt connected to the Gods. The Medieval peasants witnessed their hard work squandered by the King and the Church, but received in the reflection of the sovereign and the church images an intimacy with the sacred. Even Americans watching the moon landing live—which adjusted for inflation today costed 280 billion dollars—offered a sense of meaning and triumph in return. All of these acts are beyond utility, expenditures of which those who produced the surplus do not see a material return, yet still receive something back. Art is also a massive expenditure in its use of time and resources toward an end result that does not beget any further growth of the system at the material level.
However, both transaesthetics and transentertainment chart a movement in which these expenditures of excess become truly useless. They fail to make any return. They represent only the absence of the sacred, the loss of something which we can never regain. By making the useless even more useless, the logic of productivity and efficiency today is taken to such extremes that even our waste becomes more efficient at constituting a total loss. And it is precisely on these social media platforms that one is forced to countenance nothingness at its most extreme.
The ultimate example of this lies in an inevitable short-circuit of the algorithm that appears to occur across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube: over the long run, the consumer will be presented with a piece of content that has less than a handful of likes from a completely random person’s shouting into the void: a video of an unspectacular parked car, a teenager rendered inaudible by background noise, or, to the same effect, rendered meaningless by a language barrier. In short, these videos appear with no explanation, and represent a purely distilled nothingness. A communication from a complete stranger that has failed to get across the least bit of information, as it lacks any possible context. This always marks a traumatic experience, an interruption of the consumptive flow in which the viewer comes as close as the platform allows to a face to face interaction with another person communicating as if directly to them, this absolute banality, this nothingness. This malfunction of the algorithm epitomizes the absolute efficiency with which communication is consumed devoid of any message. This extreme reveals the overall removal of context which is continuously reducing the possibility of the media’s use-value by decreasing its ability to actually communicate anything. Less time means less context, and ultimately, less information. Even our waste has become streamlined.
And it is precisely in our free-time that this nothingness most haunts us. In the time away from work, allotted for play rather than production, we confront the fact that our play does not even provide us with the relaxation or relief we have asked of it. Instead, it seems to raise excitation, almost appearing to be as much of a burden as work itself. Baudrillard’s prophetic text, “The Consumer Society” theorized the beginning of such a process, one in which leisure becomes increasingly impossible. The concept of free-time requires that
we restore to time its use-value, that we liberate it as an empty dimension to fill it with its individual freedom. Now, in our system, time can only be 'liberated' as object, as chronometric capital of years, hours, days, weeks, to be 'invested' by each person 'as he pleases'. It is already, therefore, no longer in fact 'free', since it is governed in its chronometry by the total abstraction which is that of the system of production.
The moment that time becomes an object to be used, that it gains the purpose of expressing our freedom and seeking out our desires, it is no longer free. We experience an injunction to use it wisely, and ultimately, to produce fun. Baudrillard continues:
Doing nothing (or doing nothing productive) is, in this regard, a specific activity. Producing value (signs, etc.) is an obligatory social prestation; it is the very opposite of passivity, even if the latter forms the manifest discourse of leisure. In fact, time is not 'free' in leisure; it is expended, and not as pure loss, because it is the moment, for the social individual, of a production of status. No one needs leisure, but all are charged to prove their freedom not to perform productive labour.
Now, as prophetic as this might be, it only begins to point to the issue we now face, the latent contradiction of our free-time: that when we enter this mindless state of consumption, one that is supposedly passive, we are producing, we are working relentlessly to increase the value of these platforms: through producing our own content in our free time, consuming advertisements, and giving up our information. The passivity of our consumption is an illusion that comes at an extreme cost, for we search in our consumption for a meaning unrelated to production, to attempt to establish our freedom, but we neither truly escape production, nor find the satisfaction we seek out.
We are, without knowing it, experiencing the exhaustion of producing information in every bit of empty information that we consume. Meta Platforms could not be a trillion dollar company if we were not all in a sense working for it. Ultimately, it could be that the methods of waste which once gave us a sense of freedom and liberation, through connecting us with an intimacy to luxury, have been replaced by forms of waste that preclude us from accessing this intimacy, precisely because our consumption requires that we unconsciously participate in production.
For Bataille, a life without waste, a life in which one does not experience the expenditure of excess, is a life of anguish:
Anguish arises when the anxious individual is not himself stretched tight by the feeling of superabundance. This is precisely what evinces the isolated, individual character of anguish…Anguish is meaningless for someone who overflows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an overflowing by its very nature.
In this sense, the expenditure doesn’t need to be connected to the sacred, destruction of a society’s excess under other forms can still achieve communion, and offer a sense of meaning. Yet in our daily lives, when we try to waste our time, to expend with no hopes of return, beneath the surface we are still toiling away. “Wasting our time”, yes, but we never clocked out. The isolation of today, and our widespread anxiety, could then be born out of the fact that our leisure and waste offers no sense of abundance, but only of lack, of nothingness. We are addicted to information (‘communicated’ to us), but what we receive is neither the pleasure of entertainment, the connection of communication, or the knowledge of information. It is this distilled nothingness that gives us our fix.
For Baudrillard, leisure was intimately connected to exhibition. In this sense a solitary luxury is never truly solitary: “In all its signs, all its attitudes, all its practices, and in all the discourses in which it is spoken of, leisure thrives on this exhibition and over-exhibition of itself as such, this continual ostentation, this marking, this display.” And in social media, we bear witness to its failure to exhibit what it sets out to display, which is precisely one’s liberation from the demands of utility and production. This is because the ostentatious acts of the influencer are themselves a type of work: they have made leisure a career path, ensuring that it is servile to production. For the influencer, it takes a remarkable amount of effort and work in order to appear that one is doing nothing, in a state of constant vacation. And this logic is mirrored in everyone’s consumption: the mindless scroll in bed ends up being an exhausting, rather than relieving/life-affirming act—it takes an inordinate amount of effort for us to do nothing. Why? Because we aren’t actually doing nothing: we’re producing.
And no one exemplifies this logic more than YouTube’s most subscribed ‘content-creator,’ Mr. Beast. As YouTube’s ersatz monarch, his splendor captivates in a way not dissimilar to the monarchs of the past. His videos revolve precisely around destruction and waste at the grandest scale, and he offers his audience an image of luxury through which one can experience spectacles of leisure at its most boundless. By being the best at this, he has risen to the absolute top.
For those unfamiliar, he carries this out through about four different types of videos:
- Helping the poor through random acts of charity. (ex. I Gave My Credit Card To Random People)
- Orchestrating ritual-challenges whose winners are consecrated with money. (ex. $456,000 Squid Game In Real Life)
- Material sacrifice through lavishly squandering wealth on objects that are destroyed or consumed. (ex. Hydraulic Press Vs Lamborghini)
- Becoming the subject of the very ascetic rituals he subjects others to. (ex. I Didn’t Eat Food For 30 Days)
The first three of these videos are lavish expenditures of wealth; through charity, through subjecting hundreds of people to challenges for a reward, and through pure destruction. And in regards to that fourth type of video, in which he undertakes ascetic feats, it is instead time that he lavishly expends. In a recent video, he locks himself in solitary confinement for seven days. This self-torture is the ultimate expression of a man who follows Baudrillard’s concept of leisure, a person who “'needs' to do nothing, for this has a value of social distinction.” The viewer is presented with a life of pure leisure, one where Mr. Beast has run out of things to do, attempting the most desperate strategies to submit to the injunction to spend one’s time without purpose—while simultaneously presenting the extreme demands this places on him, the extreme work it takes to keep this up. In any given video, he will remark on the fact that he is working on multiple other videos at the same time. All of the profits of these videos are reinvested back into further videos, for the sake of producing an even greater expenditure. From this hyperproductivity and hyperleisure result the image of a man who is forced to keep chilling at all costs. As a result, he is forced to turn to increasingly extreme maneuvers, displaying how little the world has to offer, a world so boring that, as he carried out in the livestream that first began his channel, he had to resort to counting to 100,000 to keep himself entertained. Consumption and production fill every waking hour concurrently, offering no respite.
That the most popular producer of online entertainment serves to display this contradiction is no surprise: it is entertainment for entertainment’s sake taken to the furthest degree, allowing viewers direct access to act out the own drama of their leisure time, an increasingly desperate need to waste time foiled by the fact that this waste is always caught up in production. This is our future. And Baudrillard’s describes the beginning of this dilemma as such:
Still today, what the average individual seeks in his holidays and free time is not the 'freedom to fulfill himself' (as what? what hidden essence is going to emerge?), but to demonstrate the uselessness of his time, the excess of time he possesses as sumptuary capital, as wealth. Leisure time, like consumption time in general, is becoming the highly charged part of social time, the part productive of value - a dimension not of economic survival, but of social salvation.
What Baudrillard failed to foresee was that the production of value in this sphere would extend beyond social salvation to instead become direct economic profit in the form of advertising revenue and the ever-growing wealth of the social media platform. When one enters into the infinite scrolling state, it is not to find the fulfilling final video of the series, the additional piece of information that grants us satisfaction, but precisely to exhibit our time’s uselessness. It is no wonder that we are left dissatisfied when even this remains unshackled from the domain of production.
That the majority of Mr. Beast’s fans are children only serves to emphasize this point. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud first identifies the origins of the compulsion to repeat trauma not in shell shocked WWI veterans, but through witnessing a game played by his grandson. In this game, the child re-enacted the disagreeable disappearance of his mother through play, transforming a negative stimulus into pleasure. He concludes:
We see that children repeat in their play everything that has made a great impression on them in actual life, that they thereby abreact the strength of the impression and so to speak make themselves masters of the situation. But on the other hand it is clear enough that all their play is influenced by the dominant wish of their time of life: viz. to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do.
In the child’s repetitive consumption of Mr. Beast videos, they could be seen to be doing both of these. The child is first faced with the trauma of adult play, in which the adult is not truly free, but forced to produce. They then attempt to master it through witnessing its premiere example. In this sense, they both learn how to play like an adult, which is to say, they learn that play is another form of work. They see in Mr. Beast an adult for which the world has become a massive playground. But they also bear witness to the fact that this playground is simply another guise of the workplace, a hard fact to face, inevitably a painful reality, and thus attempt to consume his videos in order to both master this new reality as well as learn how it functions, and learn they do, for their own consumption of the videos participates in this production.
And it is not only children who follow this law of repetition-compulsion, in which one is “obliged rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of, as the physician would prefer to see him do, recollecting it as a fragment of the past.” We might all be stuck under the negative feedback loop of the compulsion to repeat, returning to a nothingness in the media we consume in the hopes that one day we will assimilate it and can move on. This is a nothingness that has been imparted upon us through our distance from experiences of excess: luxury industries of today fail to offer a true sense of superabundance. There is no communion in today’s luxury. We continuously attempt to search for satisfaction and true loss beyond return, but this search never ends. We fear that we are wasting our time, but our anguish results rather from our lack of waste, our utter servility to continue producing, even when we aren’t working.
Bataille writes that our subordination to the goal of increasing energetic resources, this cycle of production we’re caught up in, entails a sacrifice of our autonomy and consciousness, for it thus subordinates itself to its future-self “in the sense that the latter tries to grasp some object of acquisition, something, not the nothing of pure expenditure.” Thus, self-consciousness is achieved precisely through taking nothing as an object, a nothing that is the absence of utility and purpose. It could be that we are enticed by the utter meaninglessness and nothingness of entertainment and communication today precisely because it invokes in us the longing for this now lost nothingness which grants us an intimacy with a deeper meaning. It forces us to face what we have lost, and we return to it in desperation, so that it may allow us to be free, to give us meaning. We return again and again to check up on this wound, but it never gives us what we want, increasing our longing, and with this, taking us deeper into compulsion.
If this is the case, then maybe we should revise the way we view our current forms of relaxation, the supposed relief of the scroll, to instead consider them incredibly energy-consuming, hard-working acts. One can by all means attempt to resist this through moderation, but it remains an inevitability. As hard as we all are on ourselves, we should at least pat ourselves on the back: we are not purely wasting our time, we are producing a proliferating edifice of information about ourselves and further integrating technology into human life.