Internet, Sex, Winter, Prediction, Apocalypse



Why The Internet Hasn't Fixed Democracy

Then & Now | YouTube | 13th January 2022

Using a recent spat between Joe Rogan, comedian Ethan Klein, and several other online personalities, as a primer on the pitfalls of internet discourse. Wittgenstein claimed that language is more of a game than a science, and similarly, on Twitter, "conversation is not about verifying some fact, it's about the flow of things – it's about the conversation itself" (30m 00s)


Space Sex Is Serious Business

Tom McCarten | YouTube | 13th January 2022

"Mars missions imply a shift from space being a place where you work to space being a place where you live." Thus, space sex needs to be figured out. When NASA sent fruit-flies into space, they were so disoriented by the microgravity that they took twice as long to mate. Not a solution, just a sharp statement of the problem (3m 57s)


The Painter Who Revolutionized Landscapes

Nerdwriter | YouTube | 1st January 2022

Caspar David Friedrich's famous "Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog" is actually unrepresentative of his style: "for the most part, Friedrich's human figures are tiny compared to the landscape they're contemplating, and that augmented the vastness of the terrain." These ominous winter landscapes are an attempt to evoke the Kantian sublime (6m 54s)


Ten Years Ago, I Predicted 2022. Did I Get It Right?

Tom Scott | YouTube | 10th January 2022

All his political predictions: wrong. A prediction that the iPhone "looks about the same, [because] the laws of physics dictate you still need a battery brick": spot-on. An understandable failure to predict the precipitous downfall of the blogosphere. Also, some fresh predictions for 2032: "Short-form video is going to do to YouTube what Twitter did to blogs" (10m 47s)


Apocalyptic Video Of The Week

Frozen tableaux from a world falling apart—calming and terrifying at once


Watch The Viewer's recommendations each week as a handy YouTube Playlist.


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Editor: Abe Callard. Comments? Suggestions? Write to us at editors@theviewer.is



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