I've recently learned that American Zoomers love to learn about politics, science, and history through YouTube videos. Kurzgesagt, CGP Grey, and many other capitalist funded trash

I've told a friend about France receiving billions in payments from "former colonies" for their "independence" every year and their first instinct was to search up a YouTube video in front of me to learn more while I was trying to Google for a primary source of the hard financial data and agreements signed

People were lecturing me about how Putin thinks and will act based on videos they've seen from CGP Grey (like Rules for Rulers LOL). As if a man like Putin can be so easily understood and predicted from a dumb tech bro who watched an 8 minute cartoon yt video, especially given the context that he is the leader of such an enormous country like Russia

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Some of his worst videos were :pinker: levels of hopium huffing about how the future trajectory of the status quo is mostly fine, actually, and that a mass die off of 99% of the human race would still be humanity prevailing.

    Its easy to grow up as an American in the 80s/90s and think the Long Arc Of History Bends Towards Progress, because you've never really had to taste a generational downturn. You were born into the abundance of the post-industrial age and inherited a Peace Dividend of a post-Cold War Imperial Core.

    All your problems really just amounted to asking "Why is my country so rich but my neighborhood so poor?" rather than "How can we survive this killer virus?" or "When will the rain come to end this horrible drought?" or "Why must I be born into a warzone?"

    CGP Gray promised people living on the edge of the technological curve a very plausible vision of techno-futurism.

    One of the things I get out of various :wtyp: episodes (particularly the episodes on mass transit) is how close we actually were to a limitless utopia of surpluses and ever-escalating quality of life. Hypersonic airplanes and nuclear power and cutting edge material sciences and enormous universities churning out brilliant engineers all promised to make Star Trek prophetic.

    But the other thing I get out of various :wtyp: episodes (particularly the episodes about mass transit) is how often people are willing to throw away generational social gains in exchange for instant personal profits.

    So what guys like CGP Gray have ultimately delivered is a glorified speaking circuit of bullshit, where he gets paid top dollar to spout platitudes and we get sold a bill of goods that is never delivered.