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"More Brainless Content Please"

I like half-listening to brainless YouTube videos.

A good chunk of people complaining about the world dumbing with YouTube click-bait no doubt saw the kind of nonsense I watch and thought ‘the BBC showed much more enlightening and informative content than this modern drivel’. This comparison doesn’t work.

We shouldn’t compare these videos to television, but to radio. Lots of us have large sections of the day where we sit in our little box-houses, clicking through spreadsheets, doing the dishes, and broadly doing jobs which machines can almost but not-quite perform. It’d be nice to spend this time learning a language, or how to perform quadratic equations, but the tasks demand just enough mental attention to prohibit any serious thinking, so we don’t do serious thinking. I like Space Feather, Shaun, and anything related to Computerphile. Other people like Joe Rogan, or rants about what Jordan Peterson thinks about frogs, or why Jordan Peterson’s opinions on frogs don’t work.

These ideas replace the gentle rustle of radio shows which chatted about politicians, singers, and the Olympics, but now the internet has allowed mass-streaming, everyone can listen to bespoke subjects, and get some related moving pictures from time to time, or just a talking head making eye-contact with the camera.