The brilliance of All Gas No Brakes
bigtechnology.substack.com
bigtechnology.substack.com
Extremely happy AGNB got signed to AbsoLutley. I want Tim & Eric to do to news what they did to comedy.
I've even tried it myself a few times in social situations and the quality of the conversation often shoots up.
But Joe Rogan fails horribly to actually call guests out on their bullshit given the amount of crazy people he invites. He simply let's them talk because 99% of the time Rogan doesn't know what they're talking about in the first place. Guests on Rogan frequently opine on serious questions as if they're speaking from a position of authority, and Rogan doesn't live up to the task of keeping them honest or contextualising what's going on, which is the basic function of an interviewer in such a situation.
You’re begging the question. Who’s to say Rogan’s intent isn’t “to give people an insight” into some crazy person’s ideas? I don’t think the role of an interviewer is to unilaterally keep people “honest” or contextualize. Sometimes it’s simply to steer the conversation through different arenas and keep it interesting.
I like to read a lot of articles by people all over the political spectrum. They don’t need “contextualizing” in order for me to evaluate them critically, and neither do interviews.
You had people repeating everything from Jews running the world, to Sandy hook victims being actors, to pizzagate, and so on. Joe Rogan has 30 million listeners, he has a responsibility when it comes to what he puts out into the world. As it stands it basically a clearinghouse for bad ideas and conspiracy theories.
However, the idea that Joe has a responsibility is something I heard and don't understand. Who bestow'd on Joe this responsibility? How has the responsibility changed from when he had 30,000 viewers? And why is he supposed to change his format?
I ask this question for two reasons. One, the very idea of saying "you can no longer talk about X because you have Y million viewers" is an odd sort of censorship. Does my Freedom of Speech end when I gain Y amount of followers? Two, when did the World become so helpless that Joe "Wow look at the size of that Gorilla" Rogan has become the Messiah of the people?
As the person running the show, that responsibility increases as your audience increases.
I still have yet to check out Rogan's show, but if he's just providing nutjobs a platform to spread lies and misinformation, without Rogan giving enough context, that's incredibly irresponsible of him.
When people regularly tune in to his show, they may be exposed to a certain topic / idea for the first time, and their only exposure to this idea may be what Joe Rogan and his guest have to say. I would say he therefore has a moral obligation to TRY not to mislead his listeners.
Joe Rogan is engaged in an activity with potentially serious consequences. His audience size is such that, to make a contrived example, if a tenth of a percentage of his listeners become convinced by whatever jackass he gives a microphone to that, say, “the Jews” run the world and decide to “do something about it,” that’s 30,000 people deciding to “do something” as a result of Joe Rogan’s podcast, or roughly the population of a small city now contemplating violence against a particular group.
Joe Rogan has a responsibility because his actions potentially have effects on a large enough scale that it’s simply irresponsible for him to ignore them. He’s not legally obligated to fulfill that responsibility, but he should expect people to get angry at him over the consequences of his actions, as should we all.
The idea that all media should be paternalistic and “contextualize” and/or censor what people hear may be harmful in the long-term. I think it just adds fuel to conspiracies, since they legitimately become something the media “doesn’t want anyone to know”.
I definitely don’t think all media should be an open platform like this, but having a more unfiltered channel (including for influential nuts of all sorts) serves a useful purpose. I think any effort expended should be focused on teaching people critical thinking, and not reasoning about any “responsibility” Joe Rogan might have. People are going to get a feed of crazy shit whether his show exists or not.
This is probably just a very fundamental philosophical disagreement. I _really_ disagree with the notion that the way to deal with crazy people and extreme viewpoints is to deplatform them. In my experience that just pushes the crazy underground and somewhat legitimizes their feeling of being marginalized. If I'm dealing with crazy people, I want to at least know what their crazy beliefs are and why they believe those things.
I mean, sure I think Alex Jones is a dangerous idiot, but he also has enough influence that it's important to understand how he formed his audience in the first place. It's easy to believe that Alex Jones just tricked a bunch of people, but it's more likely that there were people out there wanting what he eventually sold them. IE, he's been riding a wave, he didn't create the wave. It's important to know why that wave is there.
Fox's Wallace and Axios's Jonathan had great Trump interviews where Trump where they let him drive himself into a ravine by asking tough questions.
In all of "All Gas No Brakes" videos, the context is a crowd assembly. Since the interviewer is mostly holding the microphone in front of a crowd member, both in the middle of the event and off to the side for personal interviews, there is opportunity for "anyone who wants to broadcast." But it is not a news network van pulling up.
It is a similar format, but without restrictions. People are comfortable with parody and satire in his presence - anything goes because you have the audience of a neutral observer. He does have a duty to guide the conversation with the occasional steering prompt you refer to, and it has a rhythm to it.
Much of the content is edited monologue footage, and that is the opportunity he grants them with unconditional attentiveness.
All Gas No Breaks provides an impressively sweeping look at anyone and everyone you might encounter wherever he chooses to visit. He presents the fanatics and the well reasoned in pretty much even measure. If he does anyone editorial favors, it's hard to see where. It's a refreshing change from the staged shots and selective presentation we've become accustomed to seeing from the likes of Fox, the NYT, MSNBC, Breitbart, WaPo, and CNN.
He casts a wide net, and the content of his videos reflect that.
I personally look to journalism for knowledge, and to help inform my understanding of the world. Not moral guidance.
AGNB is exceptional at finding the crazy people and encouraging them to be themselves on camera. 98% of the people at area 51 (admittedly a lower percentage than most events) were completely normal, non-conspiracy individuals, mostly from the midwest.
It seems that alone would indicate that they are not non-conspiracy individuals.
Pretty clear this is going nowhere. Have a good weekend!
It should also be noted that at the gathering no violence broke out, because everyone there was for fun. There wasn't even an instance of someone present mentally unstable or too ideologically fanatic actually trying to make a run for it. By all accounts the partiers and the security forces got along amiably. It was indeed a positive, if eccentric, social event.
This debate is going nowhere because it requires the participants to have a working grasp of both pop culture and humor.
Mainstream people are not travelling to Area 51 to be part of a flash mob due to an internet meme. Re-set your expectations of what normal people are doing, because it's a million miles off.
https://www.ijpr.org/2017-05-09/solar-eclipse-or-bust-small-...
Totally normal.
My other response has already pointed out your apparent lack of getting the joke, but it should be noted that if your primary hangup is the fact that people were partying at a military installation, you should probably know that specific base is one important to UFO mythos and thus public imagination. There is precedence for that at multiple locations:
https://www.newmexico.org/events/summer-events/roswell-ufo-f...
https://www.travelportland.com/events/ufo-festival-mcminnvil...
Area 51, of course, is of higher security than these locations, but there's no crime to be outside of the restricted zone. Personally, I had no interest in the Storm Area 51 event but Groom Lake would make one hell of a hiking expedition. It'd be quite cool to take pictures at the gate, and try to spot black project aircraft along Route 375.
“Completely normal” people would never go there. Ever.
Holy cow do people mistake both the scale and ordinariness of groom lake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_(airline)
We are discussing civilians who have no official nor unofficial relationship with Area 51/military/government/defense/intelligence/etc showing up at the gates to participate in a “Rush the gates to free the aliens” meme event.
Did anyone (unauthorized) really show up at the base? It seems unlikely given there is a large buffer zone and armed guards responding to people who violate it, last I heard. It's kind of like Mordor, one does not just walk in.
Also, I vaguely recall the government annexing the nearest mountain that people used to view the base from.
I didn't participate in whatever the recent thing was, but I went out there to sightsee back in the 90s. There was a guy who went to live in Rachel, and wrote about the conspiracy theorists and general cultural aspects and feuded with the proprietors of the Little A'le'inn. I think I remember he wrote a newsletter that was distributed on AOL.
"In 1995, the federal government expanded the exclusionary area around the base to include nearby mountains that had hitherto afforded the only decent overlook of the base, prohibiting access to 3,972 acres (16.07 km2) of land formerly administered by the Bureau of Land Management."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51
(I remember reading about this in the newsletter I mentioned, at the time)
There isn't, it's just that "raid area 51" went viral and was basically a meme meetup. The point was to get photos of the fictional raid, which were mostly just people standing outside the fences.
To be clear, I’m in no way harping on non-normal people or even conspiratorial people. Just taking issue with the idea that this was a sufficiently unremarkable occurrence for the population who attended to be anything like a normal slice of the American population.
Often, something like this is just a neat excuse to have a party and something interesting to talk about later.
1. When 2 million people on Facebook say they will go to a thing, you know some fraction will actually go.
2. We were hoping it would evolve into something akin to the next burning man.
3. If it sucked you could fall back to spending a week in vegas.
4. Surely of the people that showed up, a high percentage of them would be interesting people.
#1 Around 2000 people showed up
#2 no dice, but the potential was there and it may have happened at 20k people
#3 I did do this, it was fun
#4 definitely was the case, made multiple great friends that weekend
I asked if it was depressing and she said no: she'd often spend all day trying to find people who could not answer the questions or would say something wacko. In general most people knew the answers or had pretty milquetoast opinions but that doesn't make for a good segment.
I love All Gas No Brakes; I do not take it for a minute to be representative of majority opinions in the US. I think its whole purpose is to reveal certain things which the media incorrectly identifies as being a "significant" or "reasonable" opinion or to reveal the absurdism living under most American life.
For eg. the most recent video on Portland reveals the hollowing out of those protests as they have disassociated from BLM, not because they represent what BLM has become but precisely because they do not.
They're marginalized most of the time. The camera promises a brief break from that.
Is it "normal" now to go to a place where conspiracy theories suggest the government is keeping alien remains and try to storm its gates?
We used to pack a lunch & watch the prison riots in my hometown. It's like that except you can be close to the mayhem.
I end the video questioning if I've actually learnt anything meaningful about the world and its problems, or if I've just watched a modern-day freak show.
And I think the point is to clearly avoid the polished and prepared representatives who have a quote perfectly prepared for the media. The point is to find the people who aren’t polished and show what they’re doing.
He's not pretending to give a message about the issue he's "covering".
He's covering the event and showing some part of that.
Do you have videos of the whole process? I've only seen his YouTube videos and it couldn't be further from what you said. There are so many cuts that there is no way to tell what questions the people are answering
In the rocket launch video for example we don't even get to hear most questions, we mostly hear people talking, they're obviously answering something the interviewer said but we don't know what it is. The entire video is making fun of the worst people he could find there, it's very funny for sure but I wouldn't call it journalism.
It's clearly more of a comedy than pure journalism to me, a bit like "Joe goes", funny but not very informative
His strategy was just to get the weirdest weirdos on camera and let them talk. With the Minneapolis/Portland videos you can see a significant shift towards a more journalistic disposition.
No disagreement there. But the stuff you see in his videos has been selected and edited to be as funny/absurd as possible (which is the point).
I found the h3h3 interview quite interesting: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lxt6virxkio
Probably most people support the notion, fewer people would protest (I wouldn't say 'fringe' but nevertheless if you tally up the % of Washington state that 'did a protest' it's a very, very small number). And then of course, the burning of police stations, and the eviction of security forces towards taking over a chunk of the city by violent force ... this is absolutely 'fringe' and should be not be compared to the nominal ideals they are supposed to represented.
From the Area 51 video, it seems a lot of these 'crazy folk' are not 'really crazy', they almost seem like attention seekers, hamming come crazy up for the camera.
That seems to describe every non-local protest - or gathering, for that matter.
PT Barnum was doing it 100 years ago.
The quote is deeper than it might appear and presupposes that you understand that institutions are not the _sources_ of meaning as the article suggests, but, when legitimate, guard some of the things that _are_ meaningful. Not a projection of fiction on a dead existence, but actually meaningful and intelligibly so (i.e., not some kind of mere passing feeling). Ideologies have attempted to create simulated meaning time and again, silly beliefs that drive people into madness, great and small. They have always failed because the "meaning" they provided was bogus, a deception that might animate people for some time, but is ultimately a fiction that ceases to maintain a lasting grip precisely because it is false. Only someone crippled by nihilism, stupidity, or opportunistic vice could latch onto something like that.
The trouble is that we have been sliding into nihilism for some time. Nietzsche observed this slide during his era. He did not believe in God himself, but he saw atheism as a dreadful, horrible thing. In his parable of the madman, the madman frantically asks the people in town where God is. They are amused at the spectacle, suggesting in jest that perhaps God is hiding beneath something over here, or other there. The townsfolk represent the people of his day, the atheists of the 19th century. The madman, of course, realizes the consequences of God's "death" the horror of which the townsfolk have not yet come to understand. They are still dwelling in that twilight of the idols, fragmented and perverted pieces of the whole that was once held together by God before the earth was unchained from the sun and lost its orientation (Nietzsche gave the cult of Science some noteworthy attention as an example of one of these idols). The twilight does, sooner or later, come to an end, of course, and that's when even the idols can no longer pacify our fears.
I think most people are like those townsfolk. True nihilism is unbearable. Anyone who claims otherwise is like the foolish teenager who is merely spiting his parents in an act of rebellion. Some of us sense the nihilism festering in our souls and begin to attach ourselves to various causes, fads, fashions, distractions. Anything to avert our gaze from the horrific void within us and before us. And America has always been a land of heretics (to borrow a characterization from Douthat), so perhaps the diversity of bizarre superstitions should be greater in the US than elsewhere. At the same time The "mainstream" pop culture is also vacuous, commercial, ideological, and stupid, itself dripping with hedonistic escapism from nihilism as much as any fringe movement (you should also expect a ascetic reaction for every hedonistic indulgence; each excess breeds its corresponding deficiency). Actually, we are in the throes of a kind of new gnosticism, a new Albigensian movement wherein the "true meaning" of the world, the "true self", is beyond the world of facts and can in fact contradict the facts. The facts are an illusion, not the "really real". They're "socially constructed" much like the material world is the deceptive construction of the evil creator god of the Old Testament, at least according to the gnostics. It is a dangerous, noxious amalgamation of pride and delusion, a slide into self-destruction, something Man has always excelled at. It is not unreasonable to think that gnosticism is, for many, an attempt to escape their nihilism into a world of pure imagination, giving their perverted appetites an inviolable infallibility and sanctity. We don't need AI and robots to create the Matrix. Many of us are in it now.
That quote is deceptive though and and it's sometimes used, as in your case, to push religious propaganda. For every secular view you'll likely find a theistic view with many commonalities. Theism doesn't stop people from justifying or believing in many of the things agnostics do because out of thousands of denominations of thousands of theistic religions of thousands of gods and thousands of years, theistic belief is just as varied as non-theistic belief. And often they're just as vague and meaningless while virtue-signalling as something more meaningful and sometimes the love they espouse is something committed only for that tribe or out of fear of gods rather secular motives which may often be for the tribe but not because they feel they have to. Sorry if I seem course but I'm tired of this meaningless 'life has no meaning without belief in gods' trope pervade my favorite forum for which I'd rather view tech news and not be denigrated for not having found any believable gods yet. Nihilism isn't defined by lack of belief in gods.
A comment is not 'propaganda'.
Unless your comment is 'Atheist Propaganda'.
Seriously.
"Nihilism isn't defined by lack of belief in gods." Fine, but that doesn't take away anything about what he said about Nihlism.
There is something more mundane about the quote, and that is the psychology of people who are willing to believe truly crazy stuff, and there is a lot going on there, probably worth study.
If you're going for intellectual honesty, "a comment can be propaganda." But in this case it has been as propaganda if going by the typical definition of "the systematic propagation of a doctrine". Of which atheism or agnosticism have none and more often than not, in the west it's atheistic ideologies that were more systemically pushed by establishment as propaganda than atheistic by a large margin. So it's fair to say it's often used as propaganda, this specific quote I've personally witnessed used as such many times and it reeks of self-righteousness.
>Fine, but that doesn't take away anything about what he said about Nihlism.
And so what did he say about nihilism? Your criticism of AGNB's interviewees seems to be that they're nihilistic. If they were truly nihilistic, you could argue, they'd be at home sulking that there's no point in doing those things but they all seem truly motivated to do various things. I don't get this offense at nihilism when it's one of the most benign ideologies to ever exist. How many people have died from people who had no motive or saw no point in action? Nihilism is void of motive. It's when you have both motive and ideologies is when many people get killed. In that case you could just as easily rail against ideologues.
>and that is the psychology of people who are willing to believe truly crazy stuff
Maybe they see all the craziness in the world and only become a reflection or amplification of it. We can't also forget all the craziness in the theistic religions which cause people to do worse things than coordinating over silly ideas. I wouldn't condone all the "craziness" but I can't generalize and denigrate it either. This craziness, as you may see, represents a lot of creativeness and originality that you can find in man and many good things come from it, both productive and what you might see as non-productive. And if it's the "meaningless" fun they're having at harmless conventions, it isn't meaningless if it's fun. Fun has meaning in giving people reprieve from stressors, which ultimately helps us be more productive. And if not, oh well. You wind up with people who've just enjoyed themselves for apparently nothing. We could get deep into existential philosophy if you like but I think you get the point. You can look at many things as shallow but often, like with everything in the world, there is more to it than what's on the surface and more meaning in it than you may see. Because you don't see meaning in something doesn't mean it's not there.
"We can't also forget all the craziness in the theistic religions which cause people to do worse things than coordinating over silly ideas."
Spirituality is not a 'silly idea', more importantly it doesn't cause us to do crazy-bad things in general.
'Silly ideas' are things like Imperialism, Communism and Fascism - all of which are secular ideals and have caused massive, worldwide violence to the tune of many massive wars (most wars in fact) to the tune of 100's of millions dead in the last century alone, and continue to hang the existential nuclear threat over our heads.
Imperialism, Communism, Fascism are sexual evil? Maybe. Spirituality is not? OK What about the rest of religion -- the Crusades, ISIL, the subjugation of women, the persecution of homosexuals, the intolerance of atheist, agnostics, deists, and spiritual people who believe in a slightly different version of spirituality, the institutional rape of children?
It's not so simple as "spirituality good, secularity bad"
>Spirituality is not a 'silly idea', more importantly it doesn't cause us to do crazy-bad things in general.
The "silly ideas" I referred to colloquially as those which are the subject of AGNB's videos, not to spirituality.
And the "ideas" you pointed out as silly, two of which, were and are driven as much by religious motive as secular.
It's interesting how half of the people in these subcultures seem to be in on the absurdity of it and the other half aren't but it doesn't really seem to matter to a lot of them.
Or maybe they're finding meaning in the void that traditional structures couldn't fill.
Especially the Minneapolis and Portland protest ones recently put up — they showed a narrow slice of what was happening to drive home some really salient points, but if you watch them and think "THAT'S what's it's like in there", it's off base by quite a bit compared to the less entertaining local journalists (or even just streamers with a camera on a pole) who've been out there livestreaming, interviewing, and documenting for months instead of weeks or days.
Context is important; I can't speak for Minneapolis, but the Portland protests weren't just (and aren't just, and for most of the nearly 70 straight days of them haven't ever been) about the federal courthouse or the federal officers. The BLM-led Justice Center protests weren't the chaotic courthouse protests, and the 2-3k who came out for a week of feds has been less than 500 for most of the other 2 months and change. The west-side downtown protests in a 4-block zone around the center and courthouse aren't the east-side precinct and police union HQ marches with local police chasing protesters and beating media into residential neighborhoods.
Or maybe I'm still just pissed about AGNB showing mayor Ted Wheeler in a sympathetic context, complete with his theatric tear gassing the one time he came out to a protest, without the other context of how the PPB he runs as police commissioner beats and gasses media and protesters as soon as cameras like AGNB's left the fed protest stage - literally, PPB went out threatening to gas the same crowd he stood with within 45 minutes of Wheeler leaving the protest.
I guess my feeling is, some things aren't simple or clear enough to be accurately served by pithy but entertaining 5- or 10-minute videos. It's one lens, and a good one, but I get real nervous when people say AGNB is the model for news.
Very few links of people on the ground:
https://twitter.com/TheRealCoryElia
We need to remember that this is entertainment, plain and simple. This is meant to be raw, groundbreaking and "fresh" which is why myself and many others love the cut and dry nature of his content - however his comments regarding the protests in Portland and Minneapolis were troubling. Specifically, how he articulated looting, destruction of businesses (including immigrant and minority owned businesses) as a "logical response to the death of George Floyd".
AGNB will have a great future, but I think it's critical to remember that this IS ENTERTAINMENT and not in the slightest form meant to be informative.
That said, godspeed Andrew lets take AGNB to the next level!
it's what Vice tried to capture but failed. parachute journalism works, only if you inject very little of yourself into it and have minimal framework.
AGNB needs some time to grow into longer format
they're literally 3 dudes in an RV without a working toilet
if they had BBC money they would live up to Theroux 100%
He also has a porn video as an extra on pornhub.
I don't know if Tucker Carlson is the gold standard of journalism that you want to exceed.