If you want to see how I arrived at some of these conclusions in my analysis of 3DWI, I have a six part readthrough. th-cam.com/video/nFfTR4blWfQ/w-d-xo.html
@probablyjustsnails Just to clarify, I made my own music to go with my analysis series. I did not make the Petscop OST, which is great. That was made by Tony Domenico.
I’m a forester (someone who manages forests) and a data scientist. My research has led me to grapple with a lot of the philosophical ideas you present in this video essay - especially when it comes to the concept of class. The forest is a system of several complex subsystems (made up of individual actors) interact. Many people in my field say that forests are inherently random - there is no structure to their behavior. But when we observe patterns, there appears to be a structure to the chaos - it’s not a structure that humanity is familiar with. Our attempts to control and manage the forest often result in simplifications of these structures that are really pale imitations. But I do think there is a question - do the patterns of forest development exist because they are “natural” or are they patterns that humanity developed to understand the forest and then in turn shaped the forest to match those patterns? How much of the forest is natural and how much is human influenced? We have been managing forests since the invention of fire. Great work and video - it’s given me a lot to think about.
When I first experienced 3D Workers Island, going through its story, I was particularly intrigued with the character of Grace, how she seemed to be isolated from the other characters, and from the discussions on the forums. She resonated with me but I wasn’t sure why. It finally clicked when you talked about her during your interpretation and I sat there for a moment thinking about how I had related to a character with no face and no voice with my experiences with neurodivergence and feeling “othered”, along with my fears of being isolated from social groups. While I have my own interpretations of the other characters and enjoy coming to my own conclusion on these matters, this video crystallized feelings I struggled to confront. Your analysis videos are amazing and thank you so much for making them
31:23 I have experienced severe depersonalisation and Derealization during the lowest point of my depression. I would sit in front of my bedroom mirror and keep looking into my eyes, and they felt alien. I felt as if I was watching myself from a 3rd person perspective, in a simulated world outside of what "i" was. but I believed that the body i was looking at wasnt mine. Perhaps in that moment i too felt as if i was squished down into nothing but a red Ball with no personhood. Im much better now but there will be days where i feel depressed and i look in the mirror and sometimes dont fully recognise me as me.
the way the family is referred to as "workers" just chills me. it's crazy how that reduction adds so much color to the picture, and it definitely took my brain in a specific direction with this. it just BEGS class analysis
As a programmer, I want to complement the explanation of object-oriented programming in the "class condition" segment, and also add to the analogy a bit: - A "parent" class can have data and functions that even its "children" cannot access. Those are *"private"* (at least in C#, don't @ me about other language syntax) - In some very dark irony for the metaphor being used here, information defined by a parent and shared only with its children is *"protected"* - It's common for a private variable to be accessed using a public *"property"*. Most often, this is simply for the programmer's benefit to make a "read only" variable. To borrow the car metaphor, you might do this for a "mileage" variable, since nothing can impact it except the car's own functions. - *However* there's no guarantee that the public property actually matches the private variable. *That information can be massaged however the class likes.* (i.e. the property for "Salary" returns half of the actual variable "_salary", just in case it's the IRS checking)
Oh man, what a joy it is to see another deep dive by David. I’ve been here since 2020 through your PetScop analysis (no surprise there lol) and since have been in love with your content, especially your recent dive into social and political issues. Gonna love watching this one!
Just wanted to add a slight correction: Me and Miss Mandible is by Donald Barthelme, not John Barth, another postmodern author. One of my favorite writers of all time, and a lot of his works deal with the generation of narrative as it is being written: see "City of Churches" and "The Balloon." I love the inclusion of Me and Miss Mandible, and you should definitely check out "Come Back Dr. Caligari," the collection the story comes from. Great video!
The name "Thomas" appears in Petscop as in Thomas Hammond, who is generally believed to be Rainer's dad/stepdad. Given that Rainer is the de facto narrator of the game Petscop, his dad's name having weight in this series makes sense as well. Anyone who was obsessed with Petscop back in the day would immediately notice the name "Thomas" as significant.
@ Zekentaru Petscop 17 - "You have a mommy named Anna, a daddy named Marvin, an auntie named Jill, an uncle named Thomas, a cousin named Daniel, ...... " That's it. But the community generally figures he must be Daniel/Michael's dad/stepdad, and as such his name is probably Hammond but that's speculation. Only the first name is given in the actual webseries.
17:38 in retrospect this feels like something i should have picked up during my own readthrough, but pointing out the parallels between amber’s red ball degeneration and the red ball used to denote “false” kind of blew my mind!
fantastic video - the tangent of moralism diminishing thematic analysis into a set of enforced points of detail akin to religious canon dictated by the victor of a perpetual contest of appealing to both moral superiority and the extratextual statements of the author was especially cathartic to hear. cant wait to see more of your analyses
Also, you said this, and i have a question about it: "... 3D Workers Island offers a more complex depiction of degeneration as an inevitable product of any closed system obsessed with accumulation and control regardless of any ideological pretenses." What do you think they're accumulating? Or is it more metaphorical? I remember Pat's insistence that Amber is, "lazy," despite how often she works and I could easily see that as the kind of obsession with productivity emblematic of capital and The Soviet Union's efforts to respond to the pressures of capital. But I was wondering what your perspective was.
This got me wondering about the MatPat effect. If someone notable like MatPat puts out an interpretation of Petscop and discussion consolidates around it, is there a way for him to avoid flattening it? Was he too famous to responsibly have a personal interpretation of it? And no, I don’t think adding “this is my interpretation” or “hey here’s a fun lens to look at it through” would have changed anything (considering how much shit he got for a joke theory about Undertale). I was thinking about this for someone in his position in general, not calling for everyone to weigh in on him personally. It’s interesting to think about how much impact a person is capable of, and the reputation they’ve built up, can restrict how many ways they can engage with a work
the flatting of the discussion is normal, which is why it takes work to expand and diversify. I think for a massive channel like matpat, it would be better to invite guests to offer their own take and find the similarities and differences. (it would also help a ton in getting more people room to shine)
It's not a matter of individual responsibility. I am making a structural critique of the way the TH-cam media ecosystem works. If it wasn't MatPat doing it, someone else would step in to meet that demand. The outcome is overdetermined.
@@NightmareMasterclass I wasn’t talking about responsibility, or at least that wasn’t how I was trying to word it. I’m more interested in the dynamic of how a person can engage with a work publicly based on how much reach they have. I consider that more structural than moral. Sorry if the way I’m wording it is unclear
@@deebee5378 I understand what you're saying. I mean, it's definitely something I grapple with. But, see, the parameters of the discussion have again shifted to individual choices (e.g. "how a person can engage with a work publicly.") On an individual level, I would say just do your best to engage with the work in a nuanced, responsible manner. The problem is, you will be actively punished by the algorithm for doing this. There are exceptions, but they're few and far between.
Finally!! I've been so excited for this since binging your read through series. I love 3Dwiscr quite a bit, and the vague takes you shared in the read through were really interesting. Gonna get through this video asap!
@@rafalstthat's great because you also learned insults and I see that you use them! I asked for the English subtitles because I don't always understand all the words said orally. But it doesn't matter, stay in your little world of violence and continue to learn other languages to insult the whole world!
i suffered derealization for literal months in 2021. it’s nice to see it being represented in such a cool horror story; also not to mention, by the CREATOR of Petscop. i absolutely love Petscop, so it is a treat.
You were kind of losing me with the history on Trotsky and non-resistance to Stalinism but when you brought it back to the text it clicked. I think it's alright there isn't an easy wrap-up conclusion, the text doesn't really give that either The metacommentary read and insights on compressing media into a moral checklist was extremely nice to hear. As well as the note that media analysis will inevitably be compressed into the easiest one-note read of which there can only be one, because of how TH-cam and the monetised internet functions
Hi. Back in 2017, i watched all your petscop analysis videos, aswell as the source material Petscop, obsessively. It really entertained me. I had an embarassing moment where I wanted to show my brother's friends this "creepy and fascinating" thing called Petscop. They sat there and watched the whole thing with me even though they both admitted to not being amused. i have no idea why they say there with me for a whole hour. Anyway, i loved it so much. Thanks alot for those videos and sharing your thoughts with us. It is a nice memory to look back on, including the funny one of me showing 2 people who could not at all understand my obsession. I suppose only the coolest people would understand. Thanks again :)
i loved the way this opened with the in universe creator saying "it's random, you'll see stuff nobody has ever seen before!" but so many users caught on to the same patterns. all of it presented in a light of permanent uncertainty, like the lives of people caught up in those real world patterns.
I miss when Petscop was still going and the community was active and constantly theorizing on what everything meant. Petscop is easily one of the most unique TH-cam series I've ever seen and the feeling of dread that I got from the first few episodes of it were unmatched. It was an incredible example of subtle horror in that it could keep you on edge and scared without actually having to show anything too scary or have stuff jump out at you.
Excellent video, Mr. masterclass. The segment about posthumanism was challenging to me in the best possible way. I’m sad to see comments starting to come in ironically complaining about you “over analyzing” a work which is pretty clearly a text about analysis itself, but I digress. I have enjoyed watching your ideas progress and develop from the petscop video, and music!
I think your analysis on consciousness, AI, and LLMs ultimately falls into the same kind of semantic pitfalls that you criticize in philosophical discussions of consciousness. It's all well and good to say from a conceptual, structuralist perspective, "don't humans also operate by matching patterns? what truly makes our method of doing that so different from an LLM, and why are we so arrogant to believe that the way our brains work is inherently superior to this system?" But I think those ideas pretty quickly fall apart once you bring in even a touch of materialist analysis. I'm not a strict materialist, really--I think it would be very foolish to pretend that immaterial things do not have a very real impact on the world and how we experience it. But I do think any useful analysis needs to have some kind of grounding in the material world, because otherwise you just spin off into space in a way that I tend to find unhelpful. The AI thing is a good example of this, because that exciting existential potential to challenge the meaning of consciousness becomes both a much bleaker and more nihilistic idea and a drastically less realistic one once you put one foot firmly in the material world as it exists right now. Even if you give LLMs the grace of saying "look it's not the technology's fault that capitalism's dream for it is to never have to respect or pay for human talent and creativity again" you run into the immense and unsustainable cost of crunching all of that data, the sheer inefficiency of it compared to human cognition, and the very real technical hurdles and limitations that make the kind of advancements you're talking about increasingly seem not only not guaranteed but deeply unlikely or maybe impossible. Companies are pouring exponentially more money into these systems and seeing little to no (to arguably even negative) meaningful advancement in their functionality. The idea that if we burn even more of the planet in the name of AI model training it'll suddenly turn the corner and get vastly better all at once just seems like a grift at this point. And look, you can argue that this will change radically once someone develops some new methodology or approach that overcomes the current seeming plateau, and it's only a matter of time before that happens. I don't believe that is true. And yes, I do have very real concerns ahout the material impact it will have on human life if that does prove true, so maybe I too am seeing what I want to see here. But when it comes to technology like this, I think it is kind of useless and maybe even irresponsible to predicate an argument on the assumption some previously unimagined discovery will catapult things forward in the near future. I feel the same way about the idea that it doesn't really matter if said massive leap forward does emerge because the existence of the nascent technology and the idea that it could is enough to raise these questions of consciousness. As it stands, "what if LLMs prove to be their own kind of nascent emergent consciousness?" feels to me like it's about as useful a challenge to the philosophy of thought as "what if a boar looked you in the eyes and spoke the true name of God?" would be to the field of theology. Maybe even less so, given how many truly noxious big money corporate entities have a huge financial interest in convincing us all the revolutionary thinking machine is just around the corner. I simply don't think the foundational premise of the argument is sound.
>I'm not a strict materialist, really--I think it would be very foolish to pretend that immaterial things do not have a very real impact on the world and how we experience it. materialism doesn’t deny the importance of ideas, emotions, or other ostensibly immaterial phenomena. What it asserts is that these phenomena emerge from material conditions or have a basis in material reality.
@NightmareMasterclass Misuse of terms--you'll have to forgive me. College was a long time ago and I went for a BFA like the clown I am. I suppose what I mean to say is that I subscribe to a materialist viewpoint, but I know that material conditions can sometimes be insufficient when it comes to understanding or explaining behavior for the simple reason that humans are not purely rational and sometimes act based on a perceived reality that does not materially exist. This viewpoint isn't incompatible with or contrary to materialism, but I guess I felt compelled to put on the asterisk.
@fireshatter796 The thing is, any sufficiently materialist account would also include the general tendency for these technological systems to become more efficient over time due to the profit motive. Look at how much it cost to train models like GPT3 years ago vs. now. Capitalists constantly compete to outdo their rivals. In the process, they are compelled to refine and replace machinery, which drives a continual increase in technological efficiency over time. Read chapter 15 of Capital.
@@NightmareMasterclass What I'm arguing is that we don't really see the profit motive pushing towards greater efficiency in how the actual technology is developing. What we're seeing is hundreds of millions of VC money being burned on ever larger server farms with no profitability whatsoever because the product they're selling, regardless of any philosophical musing about the nature of consciousness, does not function well as a product and is not a thing consumers want to pay for. They're burning all of this money in the hopes of eventually making infinite profit when they replace all artists and writers with LLMs. I do not think they are likely to achieve that. And when the VC money finally runs out, the answer isn't going to be reducing costs and raising efficiency and building something that makes more money than it costs. It's gonna be "fire everyone, sell off the scraps for a last payday, take the bag and run." Because in the current tech industry, that is ultimately more profitable than building technology that works well and is useful. Ultimately I think we have a fundamental disagreement on this point: are LLMs a technology with great potential for growth that is only just starting to be realized? Or are they yet another VC funded tech bubble that will pop as soon as someone decides to engage the "dump" part of the pump and dump scheme? I believe they are the latter. I don't look at ChatGPT and see the printing press, I look at it and see a jpg of a cartoon ape. And hey. Maybe history will prove me wrong. But I think the world will be worse if it does.
wasn't expecting the amazing breakdown of the anthrocentric approach to evaluating reasoning in the middle of a fucking 3DWISCR analysis video Very good also 'mittens'
My kitten mittens purrs contentedly to this analysis. My sound bite is that I feel like meaning is exclusively relating to the subjective as humans will feel increasingly demoralized when looking at any artificial intelligence competition for their niche jobsource for resources and will redefine their entire worldview to maintain their ego.
oh my gosh i just started Part 6 of the Exploration video and saw the playlist counter jump from 6 to 7, so excited i get to close out this day with this final(?) video
My first read through, I figured it was a story of abuse, the blending of the real world and digital world, and that was about it. I didn't really buy your working class analysis until you explained it...and i realized it IS called 3D Worker's Island. Probably has that name for a reason.
I was confused why you called it petscop's spiritual successor until I saw the text "A thing by Tony Donenico" and I was like "T- T... TONY DOMENICO??!!"
now THIS is an analysis (totally not looking at those youtubers who title their videos as the "analysis" of something only to just summarize the main plot/story/lore)
I want to say upfront that I love ur stuff. It always gets me to think deeply about things I find important. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to think. I am a hard determinist, so I'm glad that this was inevitable, even though we couldn't have known before hand. I hope I don't come off as antagonistic because I do not intend to be (this is meant to make the following less antagonistic if it happens to be so). I'll try to be as transparent as possible to be more amenable (not the word im looking for but its probably close enough). You really had me thinking u were going into anarchist theory because of discussion of cybernetics, complex systems, hierarchies, state power, authoritarian tenancies, centralized authority, and state capitalism until u said that the term 'state capitalism' was "fraught due to ultra-left sectarian connotations". If I may ask, do u find anything else objectionable about the "ultra-left" (who I assume to be anarchists) besides their sectarianism (btw I would call myself an anarchist)? In relation to sectarianism, why might u find it objectionable (I assume u imply this)? I agree that many anarchists can be described as sectarian due to refusal to work in/with hierarchical power structures, however I think that is a logical outcome of their analysis of those power structures. I think of it in this way: its like how the state capitalist Leninist Russia then Stalinist USSR failed to be socialist due to participating in the global capitalist system. Anarchists would fail to be anarchists if they participated in/with the hierarchical nature of the state system (and all other hierarchical power structures). With regard to Susie's cafe, my answer would be: a coop would be better and give the workers more autonomy and power instead of being at the whims of Susie, but as u said it would not solve the problem of interfacing with capitalist systems. My 'solution' is certainly not perfect, but I believe it to be a step in the right direction: the cafe needs to be separated from capitalist production; obviously this is no small feat and may fail; but I believe this gives the workers more ability to resist capitalist exploitation and competition. First of all, Susie is able to become destructive because of the structural power she has over her workers, so becoming collectively owned and democratically run could collectivize/cushion economic pains instead of it being wielded against certain (or just the) workers by Susie. Completely decoupling from capitalist systems is nearly impossible at the small scale, thus doing so requires support from as many people as possible. Basically, as the process of decoupling starts/occurs, people need to be able to collectivize their economic resources so that everyone can survive. Also, plans need to be made to interface as appropriate with capitalist systems but not so much as to become too invested in capital and its perverse incentives. This is where the practice of mutual aid comes in, where people give/receive economic resources to/from each other, to survive hard spots. Appropriation (taking ownership/control from dominators) in many forms is also necessary as capital controls necessities like housing and food behind paywalls and legal private property ownership. This is just the start, but I'm sure I've communicated enough to establish at least vaguely what I mean: to fight against capitalism and hierarchy in general, we need to work collectively in power structures (structures for decision making and carrying out action) that are not plagued by perverse incentives and I believe the best power structures to do so are horizontal in nature and as decoupled from (existing) hierarchies as possible. I hope this may help to explain sectarian tendencies of anarchists with similar thoughts. Back to the soviet system, I believe very soon in the revolution they were on a clear path towards state capitalism. I define socialism as the "ownership (the power to make decisions/carry out action) of the means of production (property used for work ie factories, tools, etc) by the workers (aka the people who directly use those tools/property)". In Lenin's first decree, he declared all delegates from the factory committees to be be dismissed and put under state control to assure strict order and discipline if they fell under a wide range of different types of production from agricultural to industrial. The state was starting to take control of the already socialist factory committees and bring them OUT of worker control and into state control. Further, Lenin used quota elements of the 'taylor system' which was formed in america by the logic of capitalism to control the output of workers. The workers were not the ones making decisions, thus it was not socialist. This is a bit simplified, but is the broad strokes. A thought about your conclusion: "How do we generate the outcomes we want without producing a spectacle?" I do not believe we will be able to achieve goals such as 'freedom from oppressive systems' and 'freedom to live as you please' within our life times, I do not believe we can achieve such things in such short time scales. I am neither an optimist or a pessimist and will change my thoughts according to the material conditions I see. The people in the US and many western nations today are much less radicalized than the revolutionary populations of a century ago. We have much work to do to ensure a better world for those who come after us. We need clear goals and a clear method. I believe anarchist theory and intersectionality are invaluable to form clear methods to achieve just goals. The 3Dwiscr page "Computer Philosophy 1. Windows" has always stuck out to me since engaging with 3Dwiscr. The weird grammar forces the reader to interpret, to take a stance, to project their ideas onto the text. The constant references to "windows of reality" connects to themes de-realization and alienation. "What happens when something bad you find responsible for is there, and you do nothing to stop it, because it looks through a window and is not real?" When we are "trapped in the TV" and looking into reality, feeling so disconnected from it that we cease to feel real or be connected to others or the world itself, we become complicit in these systems of domination around us. I'm saying a truth that I need to internalize. I'm crying. I have little power to change the world for the better and what little power I have is at the expense of those unlucky enough to be born with less. To gain more power, more ability to effect change, I must communicate and cooperate with others. Ever since I was born, I have been trapped in the TV looking into the window of reality, separated from the world. I have been sheltered by a life so comfortable that it is numbing. Where have I been? What am I doing here? I cannot continue to be complicit and do nothing to stop these systems of hierarchy and domination. "What happens when something bad you find responsible for is there, and you do nothing to stop it, because it looks through a window and is not real?" The reality we look into cannot be just a window for voyeurism, it is real. The pain we witness is real and we are complicit in our inaction. First they came for the ___, and I did nothing... We need to do something to stop these oppressive hierarchies and I firmly believe anarchist principles are good guiding tools. I still suffer from inaction and distraction because I am coddled and have always been extremely introverted. The first step is always talking to people. I keep falling at this first step. This is a half step. A youtube comment. Its still hard. Thank you for your time and labor. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there and I wish you the best.
Thank you for leaving such a thoughtful comment. It's getting late here, and I don't have time to respond adequately. But you are raising some important points. Perhaps I'll do a comment response video.
I have a few more thoughts that got away from me last night. Both the 3dwiscr discovery pages and inside 3dwiscr sites, as well as us here in reality, all are distracted by a spectacle: 3dwi itself. For them it is the screen saver. For us it is this Thing. For both, its our discussions and communities. Like a virus, 3dwi spreads via people and associated technologies. In engaging with 3dwi, we fall into the same trap as almost all (if not all) of the characters: all we do is watch, think, talk, and engage. If we suppose running 3dwisrc is an act causing harm, who is trying to stop it from running? Has anyone even tried? In the real world, 3dwi does not appear to do any active harm, but as a form of media, it can serve as a distraction from harms being done. However, we have Thomas' plea for help and the ambershitheads have apparently witnessed ghastly horrors. I guess my own comment yesterday was not too dissimilar from a plea. Maybe 3dwiscr is a call for help, a call to action. However its likeness to an ordinary piece of media dooms many to voyeurism and inaction, consuming over and over again for feelings, for understanding, for closure, for escape. These Things are not bad on their own, however we and our technologies are saturated by these Things in excess to the point of inaction, or cyclical distracted action, complacence. For many, this is a spectacle, although the author may not intend it to be, it is for many. The purpose of a Thing or a system is what it does, what it outputs. Unfortunately, many Things on the internet output spectacle to many. I think we need to take a message of purposeful action from Domenico's works. We cannot sit idly as we watch suffering occur. His (i assume) works all seem to have themes of child abuse. Themes of Things and engagement may help certain individuals process and move on. This is a good thing. But that is a very individualistic way of engaging with art, for those who do not understand and for those who do not see it in the first place, can we use the art as a conduit to help others? Children are being hurt right now. They are one of the most systematically deprived groups throughout our contemporary societies. As I child, I never really saw my reflection as me. My name was, and still is, what I am called, not who I am. Nostalgia hurts me like a knife in the heart. I did not have a bad childhood. I was very comfortable. Still, memories of my childhood destroy my soul. I had nightmares of darkness of nothingness reaching into forever. Of a race that never ended in which I betrayed those I cared for to survive. If a rich kid like me had a hard time, how are others managing? I thought we were poor, I thought we struggled. I ate all the food so it wouldn't go to waste, I still do. As I child, I was powerless and I lacked the ability to know, to decide, to act, to ask for help. I was trapped. I went with the flow. A+ student. 4.0. Who cares? Why should I care about those things? Yet I still do it. A, A, A. I could live the rest of my life comfortable. Carried through college, carried to a well paying job. I could shelter as the world burns. I cannot. I must not. I know from my childhood that there are systems that hurt us that are deeply entrenched. We need to act and we need to act with clear goals and means. 3Dwi tells me that people need help and I can do something, I must do something. I know that something is up to me. I have found a way and I need to try. I hide because I fear conflict. I know it is inevitable and necessary, but this is how I was raised. It is not easy to overcome conditioning. I have always questioned why words were not really considered action. Talking is the hardest action for me to perform. Talking is what is necessary to build community to build power and relations with others. I am using 3dwi as a tool to learn how to speak. This is what 3dwi has done for me. I hope I have used 3dwi to help you. Thanks again, your anarchist comrade. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there.
I'm not entirely sure how youtube comments work. I tried posting a comment a few hours ago but it seems to have not gone through (I don't have much experience). Although, my youtube data tab says it is there and "may not appear yet". I'm posting this comment to determine if the previous comment was cen___ed; to determine if I should re-post or just wait.
Hmm. It appears that my previous comment may have been cen___ed. I will try to re-post it with some cen___ship, although it may still not work. I'm glad I save these things: I have a few more thoughts that got away from me last night. Both the 3dwiscr discovery pages and inside 3dwiscr sites, as well as us here in reality, all are distracted by a spectacle: 3dwi itself. For them it is the screen saver. For us it is this Thing. For both, its our discussions and communities. Like a virus, 3dwi spreads via people and associated technologies. In engaging with 3dwi, we fall into the same trap as almost all (if not all) of the characters: all we do is watch, think, talk, and engage. If we suppose running 3dwisrc is an act causing harm, who is trying to stop it from running? Has anyone even tried? In the real world, 3dwi does not appear to do any active h_rm, but as a form of media, it can serve as a distraction from harms being done. However, we have Thomas' plea for help and the ambers__theads have apparently witnessed ghastly horrors. I guess my own comment yesterday was not too dissimilar from a plea. Maybe 3dwiscr is a call for help, a call to action. However its likeness to an ordinary piece of media dooms many to voyeurism and inaction, consuming over and over again for feelings, for understanding, for closure, for escape. These Things are not bad on their own, however we and our technologies are saturated by these Things in excess to the point of inaction, or cyclical distracted action, complacence. For many, this is a spectacle, although the author may not intend it to be, it is for many. The purpose of a Thing or a system is what it does, what it outputs. Unfortunately, many Things on the internet output spectacle to many. I think we need to take a message of purposeful action from Domenico's works. We cannot sit idly as we watch suffering occur. His (i assume) works all seem to have themes of child a___e. Themes of Things and engagement may help certain individuals process and move on. This is a good thing. But that is a very individualistic way of engaging with art, for those who do not understand and for those who do not see it in the first place, can we use the art as a conduit to help others? Children are being h_rt right now. They are one of the most systematically deprived groups throughout our contemporary societies. As I child, I never really saw my reflection as me. My name was, and still is, what I am called, not who I am. Nostalgia h_rts me like a k__fe in the heart. I did not have a bad childhood. I was very comfortable. Still, memories of my childhood destroy my soul. I had nightmares of darkness of nothingness reaching into forever. Of a race that never ended in which I betrayed those I cared for to survive. If a rich kid like me had a hard time, how are others managing? I thought we were poor, I thought we struggled. I ate all the food so it wouldn't go to waste, I still do. As I child, I was powerless and I lacked the ability to know, to decide, to act, to ask for help. I was trapped. I went with the flow. A+ student. 4.0. Who cares? Why should I care about those things? Yet I still do it. A, A, A. I could live the rest of my life comfortable. Carried through college, carried to a well paying job. I could shelter as the world burns. I cannot. I must not. I know from my childhood that there are systems that hurt us that are deeply entrenched. We need to act and we need to act with clear goals and means. 3Dwi tells me that people need help and I can do something, I must do something. I know that something is up to me. I have found a way and I need to try. I hide because I fear conflict. I know it is inevitable and necessary, but this is how I was raised. It is not easy to overcome conditioning. I have always questioned why words were not really considered action. Talking is the hardest action for me to perform. Talking is what is necessary to build community to build power and relations with others. I am using 3dwi as a tool to learn how to speak. This is what 3dwi has done for me. I hope I have used 3dwi to help you. Thanks again, your an___hist com__de. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there.
3D workers island, in my interpretation, seems to also be a kind of reality tv show theme where it puts in real life people and looking at their real life problems and getting entertained by it. It may indicate a critique of being entertained at real life misery and commodifying people's lives for the audience's amusement regardless of its sadistic nature
I don't understand the confusion between subjective experience and physical processes. We have subjective esperinces bc our physical processes are faulty, inaccurate and shoddily built. Our brains intentionally reject information in order to keep more important info readily at hand. Chemical embalances can entirely change how we process information and everything from nutrition to stimuli can change our chemical make up. We are not perfect machines, we never had the ability to have an objective experience. Am I misunderstanding the theory?
You’re not misunderstanding the theory as much as critiquing its foundational assumptions, and that’s totally valid. For the record, I basically agree with you.
He almost touches on the idea that humans did not evolve to be logical! Logic is something that consciousness can create/produce! Not something that is necessarily even inherent
Love the way you explored this work. I... definitely am not well versed in philosophy or politics, but I admire the way you analyzed this work - exploring its context and possible interpretations while leaving the "lore" to others. Really thought provoking stuff with the perspective on AI, perhaps I'll hate it a bit less (maybe after the annoying people stop trying to replace artist with it!). Incredible video.
Upon my second listening of this video, I sort of answered my own question with the accumulation of waste. It's pretty fucked up, yeah. My head feels like it's going to explode. I was never sure who Trotsky was, really, but I guess I know now. In a lot of ways, I think the state sanctioned consolidation of power, in a lot of ways, is immoral. We are in a unique position where our movements can be decentralized, now. I've wanted to learn about creating lateral hierarchies to oppose our state, but more centrally, support each other's interests. I feel rather viscerally that I would fail at that sort of goal. Like, it would be peachy keen and cool as hell if we could just grow food, synthesize medicine, and repair infrastructure all out of the knowledge that it would mutually benefit everyone, but I'm not sure how achievable that is outside of the power structures we were raised in. :/
Hello, I really like your thoughts. What you speak of sounds really close to the concept of "prefiguration" where people come together to create horizontal power structures to support each others needs outside the purview of the state. I do believe that prefiguration is hard, especially considering many people today are barely even contemplating the current state of the world, but it needs to be done or else the next generation will suffer even more than us. If ur interested in learning more, I recommend the youtube series "A Modern Anarchism" by Anark, its very dense kinda like this video, but he does have a few more approachable videos kinda like NightmareMasterclass has.
I dont wanna spoil anything but there is a Crimson King and a version of the author in the later books of Stephen King‘s Magnum Opus that is The Dark Tower series. It‘s done really really well. BTW thanks for this vid, very well done.
I'm a little confused as to why you have Grace's Guilt on the spectacle portion of the semiotic square. It highlights the effects of labor on the workers, no?
Nearly forget, but did you hear about Pantheon from AMC? This is my first 'entertainment' that relates to uploaded intelligence. I think I heard you mention about this topic in other works, so I thought this may have some value to share (or at the very least for me). Anyway, I 'very like' your video. I know I appreciated it and will very likely re-appreciated it later.
Mittens :) Really, really enjoyed listening to the section on AI and consciousness. It's been difficult for me to find current discussion that doesn't treat consciousness as inherently human/isn't anthropocentric. AI discussion is divisive and many of its supporters focus more on technological aspects rather than philosophical questions in forums and threads today... I've been reading up on theories like the Chinese room experiment, p-zombies, etc., and it's amazing to listen to your perspective (and it makes a lot of sense to me). The section on the present state of things and understanding that humans today are melding with machine, that humanity is already functionally/socially already "cyborgs" was something that clicked as soon as you said it. I've been following all of your read-throughs on 3d workers island, so glad to be able to watch this analysis.
I will admit that i was quite uncomfortable with the ai segment, but I trusted you to write a compelling argument even if I disagreed with it, so I sat with it. And I think it strengthened my opinion that any critique of ai cannot be "ai cannot do what humans can" because there may well be a time when the line between ai and humans is completely destroyed, and such an argument relies of assuming we humans are somehow special, which is very presumptuous. It's why I prefer approaching critiquing ai from a perspective of labour. Ai currently is built on the foundations of untold amounts of uncompensated labour with the explicit intention of never having to compensate any future labourers, with ai existing as labourers who can never advocate for themselves. Maybe if we didn't live in a capitalist society, worrying about compensation would not be an issue, but we currently do, so we can not ignore this. At least thats my perspective, I will admit that my understanding of all this is pretty limited.
i still dont think your attempt to understand consciousness as computation works- we might be able to explain the presence of qualia (i.e. dopamine causing happiness), but this is like flipping a light switch on and off, and then saying we understand exactly how the light is produced. The 'switch' might determine if the qualia is there or not there (a discrete, measurable change), but it tells us nothing about why the content of the qualia is what it is. We can measure amounts of chemicals or electrical signals in the brain but thought and qualia (which ironically are what we actually directly experience) exist in abstraction and are not measurable things- and computation of course is dependent on discrete measurement. its unclear how the discretely measurable could give rise to the un-mesurable experience. i feel like the comparison rests on conflation of thought and logic/reasoning. logic is mostly something we learn, and isn't cognition itself, its just something cognition sometimes produces or contains. Logic of course has much in common with computation by the nature of computation, but there is more in thought than logic. In a way, humans really just emulate the processes of logic- one thing that differentiates us from from computers is that we can get logic wrong, and produce incorrect answers to discrete questions for little observable reason, while a computer (sans physical damage to the device) will always produce what its instruction logically should. It can only be wrong if the instruction did not align with the programmers intent. with the ai discussion- this isnt to say (as the cirtics you bring up have) that such things would be incapable of consciousness, but rather that if they do then computation seems to have little to do with it. Its somewhat comical to see companies like openAI predicting a sentient product based on computational resources, assuming there is a direct tie between the two with no real rationale for it. I actually do think 'technological cognition' is not anywhere near as impossible as some say, but also think that the ability to be irrational is a necessary component of free will of thought. of course in the end this whole discussion ends up begging the p-zombie problem, which ultimately wrecks any attempt to explain consciousness (or more specifically the phenomenon of 'experience') via purely biological means by pointing out that it serves no evolutionary function, and thus by the logic of a deterministic reality should not exist. And yet it does because we directly experience it, and it is perhaps the only thing we can be truly sure of.
To clarify, I'm not looking to "explain" consciousness as a process. I'm looking to demystify it as a concept. The way it's often discussed in mainstream discourse perpetuates a lot of mystifications and, frankly, charlatanism. It would suffice to say that you diverge from materialism at your peril.
@@NightmareMasterclass i think you've lost the second you start whipping out "CHARLATAN" at anyone who disagrees with you lol. that's just. a little goofy.
@@hunterv9259 You know, I resent every conversation being framed as a competition. I do not care whether I've "won" in your eyes. I'm not even calling this person a charlatan. All I'm saying is, panpsychism invites a great deal of charlatanism.
@ i dont necessarily think theres any losing or winning in this argument but i do think it comes off as more than a bit finger-waggy. im very aware that i 'diverge from materialism at my peril', but if materialism cant seem to provide any satisfactory framework of understanding then its not unreasonable to cast ones net elsewhere. And if a materialistic framework of consciousness is as doomed as it seems then sticking to materialism on this topic doesn't seem to actually guarantee any safety. Its not necessarily even a revolutionary idea to suggest that there are things outside the scope of materialism- numbers and other mathematical constructs are not material things but do seem to dictate the behavior of the material. i do think that we often leave what we mean by consciousnesses too nebulous or undefined and that certainly can lead to a lot of 'charlatan' or circular discussion that points to nothing because it sits on undefined ground, but just because some of the waters are un-navigable does not make the sea as a whole off limits.
my guy has a whole thesaurus open. "a Sisyphean horror emblematic of broader themes of exploitation and systemic dehumanisation" -- mm, yes, i am very clever. Just say cyclical or repeating abuse, dude. It's like Jimmy Neutron calling salt Sodium Chloride. So verbose. I get it's your style, but damn it's excessive at times. I think 3dwi is about finding deeper meaning in randomness and the dangerous bias that it brings. Though, I still struggle to understand the rainbow-rain part. I can only guess it represents individuals becoming the same balls as Amber? that said, i did enjoy the video. you should check out Disillusion ST, it's a walking sim visual novel, you'll like it.
He has a background in academia if I remember correctly, and I don't speak for him but usually they aim to be accurate with their wording over being digestible.
after the petscop retrospective idk why i expected a straightforward analysis… a lot of this is going over my head but i fuck with the bits i understand! while i wish you went more into the themes of abuse and neglect i do get that this was a deeper dive that, from what i can gather, assumed the viewer already knew about all that. nice work!
Although I like about 95% of this video, I can see one very troubling fallacy or knot of logic that keeps coming up. The original narrative, and the video, have a core theme of compressing the human being, which this video decides to interpret and explore as the exploitation of the working class. Right next to this, however, this analysis suggests that creators can be compared to workers. I think there is a serious if very complex error in here. The more I study about the way platforms, industrial structures, and attempts to model capitalist society in fiction operate and how they interact with each other, the more I have begun to feel like it is impossible for artists to be workers until the abolition of capitalism. As much as art is not inherently a capitalist activity and could definitely be made to function in a different capacity in the future, as long as there is capitalism, capitalism coerces the act of creating any new layout of things or any new combination of concepts into always inevitably being the creation of a business territory. One can't argue or reason with this process; if anybody in capitalism steps out of line a capitalist territory horizontally attacks with a copyright or trademark claim and forces everybody else into separate different territories while demarcating its own boundaries. Whenever anyone creates art, it is always inherently defined by whether it is part of existing business territories, as people celebrate the innovative new concepts "indie creators" not part of bigger territories have come up with, or gasp at the technical achievements large corporations with great numbers of workers and many subsidiaries have created that isolated "indie creators" would not be able to. Creators who cannot climb over increasingly absurd games of musical chairs to beat a lot of people to a few slots do not, officially speaking, get to make things part of larger fictional metaseries and universes even if they want to. Large business territories make the large subset of things consisting of everything there is but with small territories and fan creators subtracted. Everyone simply accepts this whether it makes sense or not. But there is also a reason people accept it. Every act of creating art regulates the discourses that can be had around that art or inside that art. Imagine a fictional work which strictly holds inside its internal ontology of people and objects and worlds that there is no such thing as gender identity, and everybody is neatly male or female. Imagine what kinds of people likely cluster around the work, and what all the reddit threads and online videos about it probably look like. The creation of the work grouped and organized all these people together into a marketable unit. The creation of material culture in the form of art gives birth to countable culture-groups practicing that material culture. However, when capitalism is the spontaneous creation of territories with no overarching structure or order to it, capitalism basically becomes a continuous competition for culture-group-creators to group people together into a particular formation around particular material culture or philosophical statements of how to run society before other people do, where those who create culture-groups that either destroy or absorb other culture-groups are rewarded. For instance, people can cluster around a work strictly claiming gender identity does not exist, or they can cluster around a work strictly claiming gender identity does exist and must be respected, but each individual will likely not feel the same amount of connection to both works equally, nor to all the people who cluster around each work equally. Over time, it is likely although not certain that one of the works will win out over the other because in this case one of them does a better job of Representing the rules of reality In Media. Certainly not all works are neatly representational, but all works will be judged by their audience for how well they do whatever task they are intended to do. There is always a division of labor between an author and an audience: authors construct entire sets of rules for how culture functions, and under capitalism, audiences are nearly obligated to swallow it whole and merely follow it. It is very common for discourse around popular culture to assume that critique is no longer a thing that exists, and rather, territory owners and their appointed creative work directors are the only ones who are allowed to think, and everyone else can document the existence of those works and create fan theories about how they function but thinking is absolutely not allowed. If you dare to think, you might get a copyright notice, or at least a stern talking-to by fanbase members who now feel they have been excluded. How dare you say _Fazbear Frights_ is not canon to the main story of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ ! The author went to so much trouble to create that terrain and collect all of us onto it, so you'd better like all the works in the series, or else you're disrespecting the capitalist owner and the capitalist owner's big happy community! What really clued me into this phenomenon were times I observed Marxist theory channels acting exactly like capitalists and acting like channel creators were the only ones allowed to think and commenters were not allowed to think. Now, whether this is okay in large, official Marxist parties that intend to become national governments is a separate discussion, but I really began to realize what a disservice theorists were doing to themselves by thinking it was okay for isolated video channels that were not yet parties to do this. It made me realize that merely being a video creator is more or less to function in the role of a capitalist for a moment, whether somebody fully has the status of a capitalist or not, and whether somebody actually earns anything from the video channel or not. Being a capitalist is not actually defined by selling products, or hiring workers. The absolute minimum you have to do to be a capitalist is simply to show up with unique capital that can generate clustered networks of people that did not exist before. I probably have not explained all that completely to where it makes perfect sense, because this is all tentative new theory part of original research I have been doing slowly and painfully over the past few years to write an over-200-page theory book on how to begin fixing all Marxisms and progressive ideologies so that they can work together, by understanding them from the inside out rather than ordering them around. But I hope after even explaining it partially you will trust me when I say that under this new theory the concept of artists being exploited by audiences does not look to me like a definition of workers, and looks like a definition of capitalists. Is this an accusation? No. Regardless of what I say about Stalin or Trotsky I believe that all ideologies first exist in parallel according to their own rules. So, while I do not fully reject the model as one that could never be correct, I think that definitionally, a model of artists being "compressed by audiences like workers" is not a model that belongs to Marxism, but one that belongs to the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition. The Existentialist-Structuralist tradition believes (with variations) that everyone is united by being self-aware subjects before they are workers or capitalists, and all progressive movements begin with the universal rights of individuals. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, believe that movements happen when individuals spontaneously form into an uncountable process of Rhizome which blobs around like a slime mold looking for more people according to the overall movement's needs, and people being the proletariat has absolutely nothing to do with it at all - unless the movement just happens to be about workers. Am I saying "stop pretending to be a Marxist"? Maybe. Perhaps. Just not very angrily. Have I defined myself as also technically a capitalist by virtue of the fact I'm writing a book and thrashing hard to try to claim the right to think? Maybe. But at least I'm very aware of it. I'm aware of the need for all creative types and authors to be a lot more humble about the act of creating than any of them are right now, and open to the possibility that none of them have the inherent right to create or spread around anything, that perhaps it's really the surrounding world authors need to respect rather than the surrounding world that needs to respect authors. Authors create every artifact in the library, in the classroom, and in the university, and they don't ask anybody what they actually want to be educated in or what they want to understand. People's opinions about these artifacts aren't necessarily something you find in the library or the bookstore. Isn't there a certain irresponsibility in that? The owner of a set of words gives you the only viewpoint on those words, and if the creator hasn't sold the words as a business territory, then the business territory owner is the creator.
@@saroporoggo Oh my god, how fragile you are that you feel the need to voice your disdain for my performance of a common courtesy that was not even partially directed at you.
You put FAR more thought into the plot than the creator did. Furthermore, you make wild claims about the human brain which amounts to science fiction. In reality our understanding of how the human brain works as a system is mostly a mystery. Even going so far as to call the brain a “computer” puts too many preconceived notions onto it; calling the brain’s function ANYTHING like a LLM doing “pattern recognition” is straight up science fiction.
49:14 "How do objective processes translate into subjective experience." The being with those objective processes has to translate them _somehow._ Human beings (and likely many other animals with bigger brains) do this by creating a self that experiences those processes. Evolutionary this has proven to be a good survival strategy, which is the reason why we now have this phenomena called "qualia." Really, I have no idea why philosophers think this is a hard question. To me it feels like they just want to over-complicate things just because.
If you want to see how I arrived at some of these conclusions in my analysis of 3DWI, I have a six part readthrough.
th-cam.com/video/nFfTR4blWfQ/w-d-xo.html
Warning to new viewers: Just skip the entire 46 min and forward section altogether, until reaching the next one that is
Skip 1:08:00 too.
I just realized how funny it is that this “screensaver” is a static image of bright primary colors that would surely burn in users’ monitors.
depends on how frequent those intermissions occur!
YAYYYY your petscop investigation is still my favorite series on youtube this is a wonderful treat :3 (im still bumping the OST you made for it too)
HE MADE THE OST????? Omg it’s also one of my favorite series on TH-cam how on earth did I not know that 0_o that’s so cool !!
@probablyjustsnails Just to clarify, I made my own music to go with my analysis series. I did not make the Petscop OST, which is great. That was made by Tony Domenico.
I’m a forester (someone who manages forests) and a data scientist. My research has led me to grapple with a lot of the philosophical ideas you present in this video essay - especially when it comes to the concept of class. The forest is a system of several complex subsystems (made up of individual actors) interact. Many people in my field say that forests are inherently random - there is no structure to their behavior. But when we observe patterns, there appears to be a structure to the chaos - it’s not a structure that humanity is familiar with. Our attempts to control and manage the forest often result in simplifications of these structures that are really pale imitations.
But I do think there is a question - do the patterns of forest development exist because they are “natural” or are they patterns that humanity developed to understand the forest and then in turn shaped the forest to match those patterns? How much of the forest is natural and how much is human influenced? We have been managing forests since the invention of fire.
Great work and video - it’s given me a lot to think about.
Everything is a feedback loop
When I first experienced 3D Workers Island, going through its story, I was particularly intrigued with the character of Grace, how she seemed to be isolated from the other characters, and from the discussions on the forums. She resonated with me but I wasn’t sure why. It finally clicked when you talked about her during your interpretation and I sat there for a moment thinking about how I had related to a character with no face and no voice with my experiences with neurodivergence and feeling “othered”, along with my fears of being isolated from social groups. While I have my own interpretations of the other characters and enjoy coming to my own conclusion on these matters, this video crystallized feelings I struggled to confront. Your analysis videos are amazing and thank you so much for making them
So glad you directly addressed Game Theory and how its issues are a reflection of TH-cam's systemic issues
Timestamp please?
31:23
I have experienced severe depersonalisation and Derealization during the lowest point of my depression. I would sit in front of my bedroom mirror and keep looking into my eyes, and they felt alien. I felt as if I was watching myself from a 3rd person perspective, in a simulated world outside of what "i" was. but I believed that the body i was looking at wasnt mine. Perhaps in that moment i too felt as if i was squished down into nothing but a red Ball with no personhood. Im much better now but there will be days where i feel depressed and i look in the mirror and sometimes dont fully recognise me as me.
the way the family is referred to as "workers" just chills me. it's crazy how that reduction adds so much color to the picture, and it definitely took my brain in a specific direction with this. it just BEGS class analysis
Ngl, your Petscop investigation got me through the pandemic
As a programmer, I want to complement the explanation of object-oriented programming in the "class condition" segment, and also add to the analogy a bit:
- A "parent" class can have data and functions that even its "children" cannot access. Those are *"private"* (at least in C#, don't @ me about other language syntax)
- In some very dark irony for the metaphor being used here, information defined by a parent and shared only with its children is *"protected"*
- It's common for a private variable to be accessed using a public *"property"*. Most often, this is simply for the programmer's benefit to make a "read only" variable. To borrow the car metaphor, you might do this for a "mileage" variable, since nothing can impact it except the car's own functions.
- *However* there's no guarantee that the public property actually matches the private variable. *That information can be massaged however the class likes.* (i.e. the property for "Salary" returns half of the actual variable "_salary", just in case it's the IRS checking)
Oh man, what a joy it is to see another deep dive by David. I’ve been here since 2020 through your PetScop analysis (no surprise there lol) and since have been in love with your content, especially your recent dive into social and political issues. Gonna love watching this one!
Just wanted to add a slight correction: Me and Miss Mandible is by Donald Barthelme, not John Barth, another postmodern author. One of my favorite writers of all time, and a lot of his works deal with the generation of narrative as it is being written: see "City of Churches" and "The Balloon." I love the inclusion of Me and Miss Mandible, and you should definitely check out "Come Back Dr. Caligari," the collection the story comes from. Great video!
one of many brain farts I've had recently.
The name "Thomas" appears in Petscop as in Thomas Hammond, who is generally believed to be Rainer's dad/stepdad. Given that Rainer is the de facto narrator of the game Petscop, his dad's name having weight in this series makes sense as well. Anyone who was obsessed with Petscop back in the day would immediately notice the name "Thomas" as significant.
yes! as well as the ties to amber, spiritual sequel is a really good way to put it considering all the references.
Where does the name Thomas appear? I don't remember seeing it in Petscop
@ Zekentaru
Petscop 17 - "You have a mommy named Anna, a daddy named Marvin, an auntie named Jill, an uncle named Thomas, a cousin named Daniel, ...... " That's it. But the community generally figures he must be Daniel/Michael's dad/stepdad, and as such his name is probably Hammond but that's speculation. Only the first name is given in the actual webseries.
17:38 in retrospect this feels like something i should have picked up during my own readthrough, but pointing out the parallels between amber’s red ball degeneration and the red ball used to denote “false” kind of blew my mind!
Thanks for the upload- still trying to fill the Petscop-sized void in my heart so super stoked to be introduced to a kindred spirit!!!
Thank you so much for this well edited masterpiece discussion on my newest favorite mysterious internet thing. Hope your mittens are warm!
fantastic video - the tangent of moralism diminishing thematic analysis into a set of enforced points of detail akin to religious canon dictated by the victor of a perpetual contest of appealing to both moral superiority and the extratextual statements of the author was especially cathartic to hear. cant wait to see more of your analyses
Also, you said this, and i have a question about it:
"... 3D Workers Island offers a more complex depiction of degeneration as an inevitable product of any closed system obsessed with accumulation and control regardless of any ideological pretenses."
What do you think they're accumulating? Or is it more metaphorical? I remember Pat's insistence that Amber is, "lazy," despite how often she works and I could easily see that as the kind of obsession with productivity emblematic of capital and The Soviet Union's efforts to respond to the pressures of capital. But I was wondering what your perspective was.
This got me wondering about the MatPat effect.
If someone notable like MatPat puts out an interpretation of Petscop and discussion consolidates around it, is there a way for him to avoid flattening it? Was he too famous to responsibly have a personal interpretation of it?
And no, I don’t think adding “this is my interpretation” or “hey here’s a fun lens to look at it through” would have changed anything (considering how much shit he got for a joke theory about Undertale).
I was thinking about this for someone in his position in general, not calling for everyone to weigh in on him personally. It’s interesting to think about how much impact a person is capable of, and the reputation they’ve built up, can restrict how many ways they can engage with a work
the flatting of the discussion is normal, which is why it takes work to expand and diversify.
I think for a massive channel like matpat, it would be better to invite guests to offer their own take and find the similarities and differences. (it would also help a ton in getting more people room to shine)
It's not a matter of individual responsibility. I am making a structural critique of the way the TH-cam media ecosystem works. If it wasn't MatPat doing it, someone else would step in to meet that demand. The outcome is overdetermined.
@@NightmareMasterclass I wasn’t talking about responsibility, or at least that wasn’t how I was trying to word it. I’m more interested in the dynamic of how a person can engage with a work publicly based on how much reach they have. I consider that more structural than moral. Sorry if the way I’m wording it is unclear
@@deebee5378 I understand what you're saying. I mean, it's definitely something I grapple with. But, see, the parameters of the discussion have again shifted to individual choices (e.g. "how a person can engage with a work publicly.") On an individual level, I would say just do your best to engage with the work in a nuanced, responsible manner. The problem is, you will be actively punished by the algorithm for doing this. There are exceptions, but they're few and far between.
@ This wasn’t meant to shift the parameters of discussion around your video, it’s a side subject I found interesting
Impeccable timing I had just heard about this project the other day thank you for this
Nmc even changed his profile pic... that's all the approval for a series I need
you fucking golden god. Haven't the time to sit down with this right now but I am excited to watch it when I can
i just want to say im loving these new mittens i got
Finally!! I've been so excited for this since binging your read through series. I love 3Dwiscr quite a bit, and the vague takes you shared in the read through were really interesting. Gonna get through this video asap!
What a shame there are no subtitles. i have a hard time following as a non english speaker. I'm so sad 😢
You can use the auto generated ones!
Yea but for such a long video it’s understandable, I REALLY miss that feature were fans could submit captions
when i posted my comment, the auto-generated subtitles were not available 😉
thanks to nightmare masterclass for activating them ❤
Git gud. Kidding. As a non native English speaker, i learned all my english trough videos and games. Like, 20+ years ago
@@rafalstthat's great because you also learned insults and I see that you use them! I asked for the English subtitles because I don't always understand all the words said orally. But it doesn't matter, stay in your little world of violence and continue to learn other languages to insult the whole world!
This comes to us at the right time, thank you!
I thought Petscop's successor was Sherrif Domestic?!
i suffered derealization for literal months in 2021. it’s nice to see it being represented in such a cool horror story; also not to mention, by the CREATOR of Petscop. i absolutely love Petscop, so it is a treat.
You were kind of losing me with the history on Trotsky and non-resistance to Stalinism but when you brought it back to the text it clicked. I think it's alright there isn't an easy wrap-up conclusion, the text doesn't really give that either
The metacommentary read and insights on compressing media into a moral checklist was extremely nice to hear. As well as the note that media analysis will inevitably be compressed into the easiest one-note read of which there can only be one, because of how TH-cam and the monetised internet functions
Hi. Back in 2017, i watched all your petscop analysis videos, aswell as the source material Petscop, obsessively. It really entertained me. I had an embarassing moment where I wanted to show my brother's friends this "creepy and fascinating" thing called Petscop. They sat there and watched the whole thing with me even though they both admitted to not being amused. i have no idea why they say there with me for a whole hour. Anyway, i loved it so much. Thanks alot for those videos and sharing your thoughts with us. It is a nice memory to look back on, including the funny one of me showing 2 people who could not at all understand my obsession. I suppose only the coolest people would understand. Thanks again :)
i loved the way this opened with the in universe creator saying "it's random, you'll see stuff nobody has ever seen before!" but so many users caught on to the same patterns. all of it presented in a light of permanent uncertainty, like the lives of people caught up in those real world patterns.
honestly the part about ai and consciousness and human in symbiosis with technology could be cut in a video of its own, it’s so good!
I miss when Petscop was still going and the community was active and constantly theorizing on what everything meant. Petscop is easily one of the most unique TH-cam series I've ever seen and the feeling of dread that I got from the first few episodes of it were unmatched. It was an incredible example of subtle horror in that it could keep you on edge and scared without actually having to show anything too scary or have stuff jump out at you.
the transfer between forum to real world to screensaver reminds me heavily of the northern caves
Excellent video, Mr. masterclass. The segment about posthumanism was challenging to me in the best possible way. I’m sad to see comments starting to come in ironically complaining about you “over analyzing” a work which is pretty clearly a text about analysis itself, but I digress. I have enjoyed watching your ideas progress and develop from the petscop video, and music!
this treatment on ai is pretty sophisticated, I'm a little shocked
yeah, except for the glaring typo I just caught that will haunt me for the rest of my days. thanks though
Oh this is that thing that Tony released and every time I remember it exists I am too busy to remember to look it up.
I think your analysis on consciousness, AI, and LLMs ultimately falls into the same kind of semantic pitfalls that you criticize in philosophical discussions of consciousness. It's all well and good to say from a conceptual, structuralist perspective, "don't humans also operate by matching patterns? what truly makes our method of doing that so different from an LLM, and why are we so arrogant to believe that the way our brains work is inherently superior to this system?" But I think those ideas pretty quickly fall apart once you bring in even a touch of materialist analysis.
I'm not a strict materialist, really--I think it would be very foolish to pretend that immaterial things do not have a very real impact on the world and how we experience it. But I do think any useful analysis needs to have some kind of grounding in the material world, because otherwise you just spin off into space in a way that I tend to find unhelpful. The AI thing is a good example of this, because that exciting existential potential to challenge the meaning of consciousness becomes both a much bleaker and more nihilistic idea and a drastically less realistic one once you put one foot firmly in the material world as it exists right now. Even if you give LLMs the grace of saying "look it's not the technology's fault that capitalism's dream for it is to never have to respect or pay for human talent and creativity again" you run into the immense and unsustainable cost of crunching all of that data, the sheer inefficiency of it compared to human cognition, and the very real technical hurdles and limitations that make the kind of advancements you're talking about increasingly seem not only not guaranteed but deeply unlikely or maybe impossible. Companies are pouring exponentially more money into these systems and seeing little to no (to arguably even negative) meaningful advancement in their functionality. The idea that if we burn even more of the planet in the name of AI model training it'll suddenly turn the corner and get vastly better all at once just seems like a grift at this point.
And look, you can argue that this will change radically once someone develops some new methodology or approach that overcomes the current seeming plateau, and it's only a matter of time before that happens. I don't believe that is true. And yes, I do have very real concerns ahout the material impact it will have on human life if that does prove true, so maybe I too am seeing what I want to see here. But when it comes to technology like this, I think it is kind of useless and maybe even irresponsible to predicate an argument on the assumption some previously unimagined discovery will catapult things forward in the near future. I feel the same way about the idea that it doesn't really matter if said massive leap forward does emerge because the existence of the nascent technology and the idea that it could is enough to raise these questions of consciousness. As it stands, "what if LLMs prove to be their own kind of nascent emergent consciousness?" feels to me like it's about as useful a challenge to the philosophy of thought as "what if a boar looked you in the eyes and spoke the true name of God?" would be to the field of theology. Maybe even less so, given how many truly noxious big money corporate entities have a huge financial interest in convincing us all the revolutionary thinking machine is just around the corner. I simply don't think the foundational premise of the argument is sound.
>I'm not a strict materialist, really--I think it would be very foolish to pretend that immaterial things do not have a very real impact on the world and how we experience it.
materialism doesn’t deny the importance of ideas, emotions, or other ostensibly immaterial phenomena. What it asserts is that these phenomena emerge from material conditions or have a basis in material reality.
@NightmareMasterclass Misuse of terms--you'll have to forgive me. College was a long time ago and I went for a BFA like the clown I am. I suppose what I mean to say is that I subscribe to a materialist viewpoint, but I know that material conditions can sometimes be insufficient when it comes to understanding or explaining behavior for the simple reason that humans are not purely rational and sometimes act based on a perceived reality that does not materially exist. This viewpoint isn't incompatible with or contrary to materialism, but I guess I felt compelled to put on the asterisk.
Thank you for commenting this! Had the exact same thoughts watching the segment for AI and consciousness but I was struggling to put it to text.
@fireshatter796 The thing is, any sufficiently materialist account would also include the general tendency for these technological systems to become more efficient over time due to the profit motive. Look at how much it cost to train models like GPT3 years ago vs. now. Capitalists constantly compete to outdo their rivals. In the process, they are compelled to refine and replace machinery, which drives a continual increase in technological efficiency over time. Read chapter 15 of Capital.
@@NightmareMasterclass What I'm arguing is that we don't really see the profit motive pushing towards greater efficiency in how the actual technology is developing. What we're seeing is hundreds of millions of VC money being burned on ever larger server farms with no profitability whatsoever because the product they're selling, regardless of any philosophical musing about the nature of consciousness, does not function well as a product and is not a thing consumers want to pay for. They're burning all of this money in the hopes of eventually making infinite profit when they replace all artists and writers with LLMs. I do not think they are likely to achieve that. And when the VC money finally runs out, the answer isn't going to be reducing costs and raising efficiency and building something that makes more money than it costs. It's gonna be "fire everyone, sell off the scraps for a last payday, take the bag and run." Because in the current tech industry, that is ultimately more profitable than building technology that works well and is useful.
Ultimately I think we have a fundamental disagreement on this point: are LLMs a technology with great potential for growth that is only just starting to be realized? Or are they yet another VC funded tech bubble that will pop as soon as someone decides to engage the "dump" part of the pump and dump scheme? I believe they are the latter. I don't look at ChatGPT and see the printing press, I look at it and see a jpg of a cartoon ape.
And hey. Maybe history will prove me wrong. But I think the world will be worse if it does.
wasn't expecting the amazing breakdown of the anthrocentric approach to evaluating reasoning in the middle of a fucking 3DWISCR analysis video
Very good also 'mittens'
My kitten mittens purrs contentedly to this analysis. My sound bite is that I feel like meaning is exclusively relating to the subjective as humans will feel increasingly demoralized when looking at any artificial intelligence competition for their niche jobsource for resources and will redefine their entire worldview to maintain their ego.
oh my gosh i just started Part 6 of the Exploration video and saw the playlist counter jump from 6 to 7, so excited i get to close out this day with this final(?) video
My first read through, I figured it was a story of abuse, the blending of the real world and digital world, and that was about it. I didn't really buy your working class analysis until you explained it...and i realized it IS called 3D Worker's Island. Probably has that name for a reason.
All of the above. It's all interconnected.
i cant believe LLM are going to get human rights before trans people do. 😞
TTD
lol what?
Anybody seen my mittens?
I was confused why you called it petscop's spiritual successor until I saw the text "A thing by Tony Donenico" and I was like "T- T... TONY DOMENICO??!!"
now THIS is an analysis (totally not looking at those youtubers who title their videos as the "analysis" of something only to just summarize the main plot/story/lore)
I want to say upfront that I love ur stuff. It always gets me to think deeply about things I find important. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to think. I am a hard determinist, so I'm glad that this was inevitable, even though we couldn't have known before hand. I hope I don't come off as antagonistic because I do not intend to be (this is meant to make the following less antagonistic if it happens to be so). I'll try to be as transparent as possible to be more amenable (not the word im looking for but its probably close enough).
You really had me thinking u were going into anarchist theory because of discussion of cybernetics, complex systems, hierarchies, state power, authoritarian tenancies, centralized authority, and state capitalism until u said that the term 'state capitalism' was "fraught due to ultra-left sectarian connotations". If I may ask, do u find anything else objectionable about the "ultra-left" (who I assume to be anarchists) besides their sectarianism (btw I would call myself an anarchist)? In relation to sectarianism, why might u find it objectionable (I assume u imply this)? I agree that many anarchists can be described as sectarian due to refusal to work in/with hierarchical power structures, however I think that is a logical outcome of their analysis of those power structures. I think of it in this way: its like how the state capitalist Leninist Russia then Stalinist USSR failed to be socialist due to participating in the global capitalist system. Anarchists would fail to be anarchists if they participated in/with the hierarchical nature of the state system (and all other hierarchical power structures).
With regard to Susie's cafe, my answer would be: a coop would be better and give the workers more autonomy and power instead of being at the whims of Susie, but as u said it would not solve the problem of interfacing with capitalist systems. My 'solution' is certainly not perfect, but I believe it to be a step in the right direction: the cafe needs to be separated from capitalist production; obviously this is no small feat and may fail; but I believe this gives the workers more ability to resist capitalist exploitation and competition. First of all, Susie is able to become destructive because of the structural power she has over her workers, so becoming collectively owned and democratically run could collectivize/cushion economic pains instead of it being wielded against certain (or just the) workers by Susie. Completely decoupling from capitalist systems is nearly impossible at the small scale, thus doing so requires support from as many people as possible. Basically, as the process of decoupling starts/occurs, people need to be able to collectivize their economic resources so that everyone can survive. Also, plans need to be made to interface as appropriate with capitalist systems but not so much as to become too invested in capital and its perverse incentives. This is where the practice of mutual aid comes in, where people give/receive economic resources to/from each other, to survive hard spots. Appropriation (taking ownership/control from dominators) in many forms is also necessary as capital controls necessities like housing and food behind paywalls and legal private property ownership. This is just the start, but I'm sure I've communicated enough to establish at least vaguely what I mean: to fight against capitalism and hierarchy in general, we need to work collectively in power structures (structures for decision making and carrying out action) that are not plagued by perverse incentives and I believe the best power structures to do so are horizontal in nature and as decoupled from (existing) hierarchies as possible. I hope this may help to explain sectarian tendencies of anarchists with similar thoughts.
Back to the soviet system, I believe very soon in the revolution they were on a clear path towards state capitalism. I define socialism as the "ownership (the power to make decisions/carry out action) of the means of production (property used for work ie factories, tools, etc) by the workers (aka the people who directly use those tools/property)". In Lenin's first decree, he declared all delegates from the factory committees to be be dismissed and put under state control to assure strict order and discipline if they fell under a wide range of different types of production from agricultural to industrial. The state was starting to take control of the already socialist factory committees and bring them OUT of worker control and into state control. Further, Lenin used quota elements of the 'taylor system' which was formed in america by the logic of capitalism to control the output of workers. The workers were not the ones making decisions, thus it was not socialist. This is a bit simplified, but is the broad strokes.
A thought about your conclusion: "How do we generate the outcomes we want without producing a spectacle?" I do not believe we will be able to achieve goals such as 'freedom from oppressive systems' and 'freedom to live as you please' within our life times, I do not believe we can achieve such things in such short time scales. I am neither an optimist or a pessimist and will change my thoughts according to the material conditions I see. The people in the US and many western nations today are much less radicalized than the revolutionary populations of a century ago. We have much work to do to ensure a better world for those who come after us. We need clear goals and a clear method. I believe anarchist theory and intersectionality are invaluable to form clear methods to achieve just goals. The 3Dwiscr page "Computer Philosophy 1. Windows" has always stuck out to me since engaging with 3Dwiscr. The weird grammar forces the reader to interpret, to take a stance, to project their ideas onto the text. The constant references to "windows of reality" connects to themes de-realization and alienation. "What happens when something bad you find responsible for is there, and you do nothing to stop it, because it looks through a window and is not real?" When we are "trapped in the TV" and looking into reality, feeling so disconnected from it that we cease to feel real or be connected to others or the world itself, we become complicit in these systems of domination around us. I'm saying a truth that I need to internalize. I'm crying. I have little power to change the world for the better and what little power I have is at the expense of those unlucky enough to be born with less. To gain more power, more ability to effect change, I must communicate and cooperate with others. Ever since I was born, I have been trapped in the TV looking into the window of reality, separated from the world. I have been sheltered by a life so comfortable that it is numbing. Where have I been? What am I doing here? I cannot continue to be complicit and do nothing to stop these systems of hierarchy and domination. "What happens when something bad you find responsible for is there, and you do nothing to stop it, because it looks through a window and is not real?" The reality we look into cannot be just a window for voyeurism, it is real. The pain we witness is real and we are complicit in our inaction. First they came for the ___, and I did nothing... We need to do something to stop these oppressive hierarchies and I firmly believe anarchist principles are good guiding tools. I still suffer from inaction and distraction because I am coddled and have always been extremely introverted. The first step is always talking to people. I keep falling at this first step. This is a half step. A youtube comment. Its still hard. Thank you for your time and labor. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there and I wish you the best.
Thank you for leaving such a thoughtful comment. It's getting late here, and I don't have time to respond adequately. But you are raising some important points. Perhaps I'll do a comment response video.
I have a few more thoughts that got away from me last night.
Both the 3dwiscr discovery pages and inside 3dwiscr sites, as well as us here in reality, all are distracted by a spectacle: 3dwi itself. For them it is the screen saver. For us it is this Thing. For both, its our discussions and communities. Like a virus, 3dwi spreads via people and associated technologies. In engaging with 3dwi, we fall into the same trap as almost all (if not all) of the characters: all we do is watch, think, talk, and engage. If we suppose running 3dwisrc is an act causing harm, who is trying to stop it from running? Has anyone even tried? In the real world, 3dwi does not appear to do any active harm, but as a form of media, it can serve as a distraction from harms being done. However, we have Thomas' plea for help and the ambershitheads have apparently witnessed ghastly horrors. I guess my own comment yesterday was not too dissimilar from a plea. Maybe 3dwiscr is a call for help, a call to action. However its likeness to an ordinary piece of media dooms many to voyeurism and inaction, consuming over and over again for feelings, for understanding, for closure, for escape. These Things are not bad on their own, however we and our technologies are saturated by these Things in excess to the point of inaction, or cyclical distracted action, complacence. For many, this is a spectacle, although the author may not intend it to be, it is for many. The purpose of a Thing or a system is what it does, what it outputs. Unfortunately, many Things on the internet output spectacle to many. I think we need to take a message of purposeful action from Domenico's works. We cannot sit idly as we watch suffering occur. His (i assume) works all seem to have themes of child abuse. Themes of Things and engagement may help certain individuals process and move on. This is a good thing. But that is a very individualistic way of engaging with art, for those who do not understand and for those who do not see it in the first place, can we use the art as a conduit to help others? Children are being hurt right now. They are one of the most systematically deprived groups throughout our contemporary societies. As I child, I never really saw my reflection as me. My name was, and still is, what I am called, not who I am. Nostalgia hurts me like a knife in the heart. I did not have a bad childhood. I was very comfortable. Still, memories of my childhood destroy my soul. I had nightmares of darkness of nothingness reaching into forever. Of a race that never ended in which I betrayed those I cared for to survive. If a rich kid like me had a hard time, how are others managing? I thought we were poor, I thought we struggled. I ate all the food so it wouldn't go to waste, I still do. As I child, I was powerless and I lacked the ability to know, to decide, to act, to ask for help. I was trapped. I went with the flow. A+ student. 4.0. Who cares? Why should I care about those things? Yet I still do it. A, A, A. I could live the rest of my life comfortable. Carried through college, carried to a well paying job. I could shelter as the world burns. I cannot. I must not. I know from my childhood that there are systems that hurt us that are deeply entrenched. We need to act and we need to act with clear goals and means. 3Dwi tells me that people need help and I can do something, I must do something. I know that something is up to me. I have found a way and I need to try. I hide because I fear conflict. I know it is inevitable and necessary, but this is how I was raised. It is not easy to overcome conditioning. I have always questioned why words were not really considered action. Talking is the hardest action for me to perform. Talking is what is necessary to build community to build power and relations with others. I am using 3dwi as a tool to learn how to speak. This is what 3dwi has done for me. I hope I have used 3dwi to help you. Thanks again, your anarchist comrade. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there.
I'm not entirely sure how youtube comments work. I tried posting a comment a few hours ago but it seems to have not gone through (I don't have much experience). Although, my youtube data tab says it is there and "may not appear yet". I'm posting this comment to determine if the previous comment was cen___ed; to determine if I should re-post or just wait.
Hmm. It appears that my previous comment may have been cen___ed. I will try to re-post it with some cen___ship, although it may still not work. I'm glad I save these things:
I have a few more thoughts that got away from me last night.
Both the 3dwiscr discovery pages and inside 3dwiscr sites, as well as us here in reality, all are distracted by a spectacle: 3dwi itself. For them it is the screen saver. For us it is this Thing. For both, its our discussions and communities. Like a virus, 3dwi spreads via people and associated technologies. In engaging with 3dwi, we fall into the same trap as almost all (if not all) of the characters: all we do is watch, think, talk, and engage. If we suppose running 3dwisrc is an act causing harm, who is trying to stop it from running? Has anyone even tried? In the real world, 3dwi does not appear to do any active h_rm, but as a form of media, it can serve as a distraction from harms being done. However, we have Thomas' plea for help and the ambers__theads have apparently witnessed ghastly horrors. I guess my own comment yesterday was not too dissimilar from a plea. Maybe 3dwiscr is a call for help, a call to action. However its likeness to an ordinary piece of media dooms many to voyeurism and inaction, consuming over and over again for feelings, for understanding, for closure, for escape. These Things are not bad on their own, however we and our technologies are saturated by these Things in excess to the point of inaction, or cyclical distracted action, complacence. For many, this is a spectacle, although the author may not intend it to be, it is for many. The purpose of a Thing or a system is what it does, what it outputs. Unfortunately, many Things on the internet output spectacle to many. I think we need to take a message of purposeful action from Domenico's works. We cannot sit idly as we watch suffering occur. His (i assume) works all seem to have themes of child a___e. Themes of Things and engagement may help certain individuals process and move on. This is a good thing. But that is a very individualistic way of engaging with art, for those who do not understand and for those who do not see it in the first place, can we use the art as a conduit to help others? Children are being h_rt right now. They are one of the most systematically deprived groups throughout our contemporary societies. As I child, I never really saw my reflection as me. My name was, and still is, what I am called, not who I am. Nostalgia h_rts me like a k__fe in the heart. I did not have a bad childhood. I was very comfortable. Still, memories of my childhood destroy my soul. I had nightmares of darkness of nothingness reaching into forever. Of a race that never ended in which I betrayed those I cared for to survive. If a rich kid like me had a hard time, how are others managing? I thought we were poor, I thought we struggled. I ate all the food so it wouldn't go to waste, I still do. As I child, I was powerless and I lacked the ability to know, to decide, to act, to ask for help. I was trapped. I went with the flow. A+ student. 4.0. Who cares? Why should I care about those things? Yet I still do it. A, A, A. I could live the rest of my life comfortable. Carried through college, carried to a well paying job. I could shelter as the world burns. I cannot. I must not. I know from my childhood that there are systems that hurt us that are deeply entrenched. We need to act and we need to act with clear goals and means. 3Dwi tells me that people need help and I can do something, I must do something. I know that something is up to me. I have found a way and I need to try. I hide because I fear conflict. I know it is inevitable and necessary, but this is how I was raised. It is not easy to overcome conditioning. I have always questioned why words were not really considered action. Talking is the hardest action for me to perform. Talking is what is necessary to build community to build power and relations with others. I am using 3dwi as a tool to learn how to speak. This is what 3dwi has done for me. I hope I have used 3dwi to help you. Thanks again, your an___hist com__de. All the power to all the people. Goodluck out there.
3D workers island, in my interpretation, seems to also be a kind of reality tv show theme where it puts in real life people and looking at their real life problems and getting entertained by it. It may indicate a critique of being entertained at real life misery and commodifying people's lives for the audience's amusement regardless of its sadistic nature
I don't understand the confusion between subjective experience and physical processes. We have subjective esperinces bc our physical processes are faulty, inaccurate and shoddily built. Our brains intentionally reject information in order to keep more important info readily at hand. Chemical embalances can entirely change how we process information and everything from nutrition to stimuli can change our chemical make up. We are not perfect machines, we never had the ability to have an objective experience.
Am I misunderstanding the theory?
You’re not misunderstanding the theory as much as critiquing its foundational assumptions, and that’s totally valid. For the record, I basically agree with you.
He almost touches on the idea that humans did not evolve to be logical! Logic is something that consciousness can create/produce! Not something that is necessarily even inherent
Immense work, great job!
Realize now that productivity is pre-loaded into such oraise language.
Love the way you explored this work. I... definitely am not well versed in philosophy or politics, but I admire the way you analyzed this work - exploring its context and possible interpretations while leaving the "lore" to others. Really thought provoking stuff with the perspective on AI, perhaps I'll hate it a bit less (maybe after the annoying people stop trying to replace artist with it!). Incredible video.
we are so back
Mittens. really missed these long deep dives of yours, but also respect the time it takes to make these.
IVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS🎉🎉🎉
That goth drum machine intro thooooo
Upon my second listening of this video, I sort of answered my own question with the accumulation of waste. It's pretty fucked up, yeah. My head feels like it's going to explode. I was never sure who Trotsky was, really, but I guess I know now. In a lot of ways, I think the state sanctioned consolidation of power, in a lot of ways, is immoral. We are in a unique position where our movements can be decentralized, now. I've wanted to learn about creating lateral hierarchies to oppose our state, but more centrally, support each other's interests. I feel rather viscerally that I would fail at that sort of goal. Like, it would be peachy keen and cool as hell if we could just grow food, synthesize medicine, and repair infrastructure all out of the knowledge that it would mutually benefit everyone, but I'm not sure how achievable that is outside of the power structures we were raised in. :/
Hello, I really like your thoughts. What you speak of sounds really close to the concept of "prefiguration" where people come together to create horizontal power structures to support each others needs outside the purview of the state. I do believe that prefiguration is hard, especially considering many people today are barely even contemplating the current state of the world, but it needs to be done or else the next generation will suffer even more than us. If ur interested in learning more, I recommend the youtube series "A Modern Anarchism" by Anark, its very dense kinda like this video, but he does have a few more approachable videos kinda like NightmareMasterclass has.
"but that's just a masterclass... a nightmare masterclass!"
I dont wanna spoil anything but there is a Crimson King and a version of the author in the later books of Stephen King‘s Magnum Opus that is The Dark Tower series. It‘s done really really well. BTW thanks for this vid, very well done.
I'm a little confused as to why you have Grace's Guilt on the spectacle portion of the semiotic square. It highlights the effects of labor on the workers, no?
Fingers crossed the score for this video gets released as well
Sure glad I had mittens today. It was really cold out! Wonder if there could be different islands with different weather???
Nearly forget, but did you hear about Pantheon from AMC? This is my first 'entertainment' that relates to uploaded intelligence.
I think I heard you mention about this topic in other works, so I thought this may have some value to share (or at the very least for me).
Anyway, I 'very like' your video. I know I appreciated it and will very likely re-appreciated it later.
CINEMA!!!
Mittens :)
Really, really enjoyed listening to the section on AI and consciousness. It's been difficult for me to find current discussion that doesn't treat consciousness as inherently human/isn't anthropocentric. AI discussion is divisive and many of its supporters focus more on technological aspects rather than philosophical questions in forums and threads today... I've been reading up on theories like the Chinese room experiment, p-zombies, etc., and it's amazing to listen to your perspective (and it makes a lot of sense to me).
The section on the present state of things and understanding that humans today are melding with machine, that humanity is already functionally/socially already "cyborgs" was something that clicked as soon as you said it.
I've been following all of your read-throughs on 3d workers island, so glad to be able to watch this analysis.
We can investigate this together!
I will admit that i was quite uncomfortable with the ai segment, but I trusted you to write a compelling argument even if I disagreed with it, so I sat with it.
And I think it strengthened my opinion that any critique of ai cannot be "ai cannot do what humans can" because there may well be a time when the line between ai and humans is completely destroyed, and such an argument relies of assuming we humans are somehow special, which is very presumptuous.
It's why I prefer approaching critiquing ai from a perspective of labour. Ai currently is built on the foundations of untold amounts of uncompensated labour with the explicit intention of never having to compensate any future labourers, with ai existing as labourers who can never advocate for themselves.
Maybe if we didn't live in a capitalist society, worrying about compensation would not be an issue, but we currently do, so we can not ignore this.
At least thats my perspective, I will admit that my understanding of all this is pretty limited.
Man, I had things to do.
I have been waiting. I am prepared with snacks.
i still dont think your attempt to understand consciousness as computation works- we might be able to explain the presence of qualia (i.e. dopamine causing happiness), but this is like flipping a light switch on and off, and then saying we understand exactly how the light is produced. The 'switch' might determine if the qualia is there or not there (a discrete, measurable change), but it tells us nothing about why the content of the qualia is what it is. We can measure amounts of chemicals or electrical signals in the brain but thought and qualia (which ironically are what we actually directly experience) exist in abstraction and are not measurable things- and computation of course is dependent on discrete measurement. its unclear how the discretely measurable could give rise to the un-mesurable experience.
i feel like the comparison rests on conflation of thought and logic/reasoning. logic is mostly something we learn, and isn't cognition itself, its just something cognition sometimes produces or contains. Logic of course has much in common with computation by the nature of computation, but there is more in thought than logic. In a way, humans really just emulate the processes of logic- one thing that differentiates us from from computers is that we can get logic wrong, and produce incorrect answers to discrete questions for little observable reason, while a computer (sans physical damage to the device) will always produce what its instruction logically should. It can only be wrong if the instruction did not align with the programmers intent.
with the ai discussion- this isnt to say (as the cirtics you bring up have) that such things would be incapable of consciousness, but rather that if they do then computation seems to have little to do with it. Its somewhat comical to see companies like openAI predicting a sentient product based on computational resources, assuming there is a direct tie between the two with no real rationale for it. I actually do think 'technological cognition' is not anywhere near as impossible as some say, but also think that the ability to be irrational is a necessary component of free will of thought.
of course in the end this whole discussion ends up begging the p-zombie problem, which ultimately wrecks any attempt to explain consciousness (or more specifically the phenomenon of 'experience') via purely biological means by pointing out that it serves no evolutionary function, and thus by the logic of a deterministic reality should not exist. And yet it does because we directly experience it, and it is perhaps the only thing we can be truly sure of.
To clarify, I'm not looking to "explain" consciousness as a process. I'm looking to demystify it as a concept. The way it's often discussed in mainstream discourse perpetuates a lot of mystifications and, frankly, charlatanism. It would suffice to say that you diverge from materialism at your peril.
@@NightmareMasterclass i think you've lost the second you start whipping out "CHARLATAN" at anyone who disagrees with you lol. that's just. a little goofy.
@@hunterv9259 You know, I resent every conversation being framed as a competition. I do not care whether I've "won" in your eyes. I'm not even calling this person a charlatan. All I'm saying is, panpsychism invites a great deal of charlatanism.
@ i dont necessarily think theres any losing or winning in this argument but i do think it comes off as more than a bit finger-waggy. im very aware that i 'diverge from materialism at my peril', but if materialism cant seem to provide any satisfactory framework of understanding then its not unreasonable to cast ones net elsewhere. And if a materialistic framework of consciousness is as doomed as it seems then sticking to materialism on this topic doesn't seem to actually guarantee any safety. Its not necessarily even a revolutionary idea to suggest that there are things outside the scope of materialism- numbers and other mathematical constructs are not material things but do seem to dictate the behavior of the material.
i do think that we often leave what we mean by consciousnesses too nebulous or undefined and that certainly can lead to a lot of 'charlatan' or circular discussion that points to nothing because it sits on undefined ground, but just because some of the waters are un-navigable does not make the sea as a whole off limits.
@stoplight2554 Yeah, I am finger wagging. I've seen what happens when you go down this rabbit hole.
hell yeah thank you
the author in the narrative but not being really the author reminded me also of The Beginner’s Guide by davey wreden!
3D Workers Island sounds like a propaganda game created by Jeff Bezos
Just wanted to say...I like your mittens. 🧤
This was a complex mittens tutorial
Amazing video!! BTW- anyone else thinking about Severance especially Worker Degeneration? Many similar themes I think
Just watched the premiere of the second season. I'm excited to see where they go with this severance concept.
Agreed. I have faith the show runners will do a good job, they are working with a stellar team :) @@NightmareMasterclass
We live in fucking *dire* times man
Yaaaay (for the algorithm)
was mostly listening on audio but i did catch mittens
Sometimes I'm not sure if you are overthinking things. On the other hand, you keep reaching really good conclusions.
Mittens
Love the philosophical and scientific analysis of mind and consciousness. ❤❤❤
lets get floppy
my guy has a whole thesaurus open.
"a Sisyphean horror emblematic of broader themes of exploitation and systemic dehumanisation" -- mm, yes, i am very clever. Just say cyclical or repeating abuse, dude. It's like Jimmy Neutron calling salt Sodium Chloride. So verbose. I get it's your style, but damn it's excessive at times.
I think 3dwi is about finding deeper meaning in randomness and the dangerous bias that it brings. Though, I still struggle to understand the rainbow-rain part. I can only guess it represents individuals becoming the same balls as Amber?
that said, i did enjoy the video. you should check out Disillusion ST, it's a walking sim visual novel, you'll like it.
also the soviet union was imperialist. Communism isn't possible, maybe after an apocalypse.
He has a background in academia if I remember correctly, and I don't speak for him but usually they aim to be accurate with their wording over being digestible.
@ Must be a philosophy professor
after the petscop retrospective idk why i expected a straightforward analysis… a lot of this is going over my head but i fuck with the bits i understand! while i wish you went more into the themes of abuse and neglect i do get that this was a deeper dive that, from what i can gather, assumed the viewer already knew about all that. nice work!
1:32:40 Mitturzzz…
*Gah!* I’m awake, I’m awake!
David Lynch would be proud of your sentiment… #mourning ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hell yeah
Although I like about 95% of this video, I can see one very troubling fallacy or knot of logic that keeps coming up. The original narrative, and the video, have a core theme of compressing the human being, which this video decides to interpret and explore as the exploitation of the working class. Right next to this, however, this analysis suggests that creators can be compared to workers. I think there is a serious if very complex error in here.
The more I study about the way platforms, industrial structures, and attempts to model capitalist society in fiction operate and how they interact with each other, the more I have begun to feel like it is impossible for artists to be workers until the abolition of capitalism. As much as art is not inherently a capitalist activity and could definitely be made to function in a different capacity in the future, as long as there is capitalism, capitalism coerces the act of creating any new layout of things or any new combination of concepts into always inevitably being the creation of a business territory. One can't argue or reason with this process; if anybody in capitalism steps out of line a capitalist territory horizontally attacks with a copyright or trademark claim and forces everybody else into separate different territories while demarcating its own boundaries. Whenever anyone creates art, it is always inherently defined by whether it is part of existing business territories, as people celebrate the innovative new concepts "indie creators" not part of bigger territories have come up with, or gasp at the technical achievements large corporations with great numbers of workers and many subsidiaries have created that isolated "indie creators" would not be able to. Creators who cannot climb over increasingly absurd games of musical chairs to beat a lot of people to a few slots do not, officially speaking, get to make things part of larger fictional metaseries and universes even if they want to. Large business territories make the large subset of things consisting of everything there is but with small territories and fan creators subtracted. Everyone simply accepts this whether it makes sense or not.
But there is also a reason people accept it. Every act of creating art regulates the discourses that can be had around that art or inside that art. Imagine a fictional work which strictly holds inside its internal ontology of people and objects and worlds that there is no such thing as gender identity, and everybody is neatly male or female. Imagine what kinds of people likely cluster around the work, and what all the reddit threads and online videos about it probably look like. The creation of the work grouped and organized all these people together into a marketable unit. The creation of material culture in the form of art gives birth to countable culture-groups practicing that material culture. However, when capitalism is the spontaneous creation of territories with no overarching structure or order to it, capitalism basically becomes a continuous competition for culture-group-creators to group people together into a particular formation around particular material culture or philosophical statements of how to run society before other people do, where those who create culture-groups that either destroy or absorb other culture-groups are rewarded. For instance, people can cluster around a work strictly claiming gender identity does not exist, or they can cluster around a work strictly claiming gender identity does exist and must be respected, but each individual will likely not feel the same amount of connection to both works equally, nor to all the people who cluster around each work equally. Over time, it is likely although not certain that one of the works will win out over the other because in this case one of them does a better job of Representing the rules of reality In Media. Certainly not all works are neatly representational, but all works will be judged by their audience for how well they do whatever task they are intended to do.
There is always a division of labor between an author and an audience: authors construct entire sets of rules for how culture functions, and under capitalism, audiences are nearly obligated to swallow it whole and merely follow it. It is very common for discourse around popular culture to assume that critique is no longer a thing that exists, and rather, territory owners and their appointed creative work directors are the only ones who are allowed to think, and everyone else can document the existence of those works and create fan theories about how they function but thinking is absolutely not allowed. If you dare to think, you might get a copyright notice, or at least a stern talking-to by fanbase members who now feel they have been excluded. How dare you say _Fazbear Frights_ is not canon to the main story of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ ! The author went to so much trouble to create that terrain and collect all of us onto it, so you'd better like all the works in the series, or else you're disrespecting the capitalist owner and the capitalist owner's big happy community!
What really clued me into this phenomenon were times I observed Marxist theory channels acting exactly like capitalists and acting like channel creators were the only ones allowed to think and commenters were not allowed to think. Now, whether this is okay in large, official Marxist parties that intend to become national governments is a separate discussion, but I really began to realize what a disservice theorists were doing to themselves by thinking it was okay for isolated video channels that were not yet parties to do this. It made me realize that merely being a video creator is more or less to function in the role of a capitalist for a moment, whether somebody fully has the status of a capitalist or not, and whether somebody actually earns anything from the video channel or not. Being a capitalist is not actually defined by selling products, or hiring workers. The absolute minimum you have to do to be a capitalist is simply to show up with unique capital that can generate clustered networks of people that did not exist before.
I probably have not explained all that completely to where it makes perfect sense, because this is all tentative new theory part of original research I have been doing slowly and painfully over the past few years to write an over-200-page theory book on how to begin fixing all Marxisms and progressive ideologies so that they can work together, by understanding them from the inside out rather than ordering them around.
But I hope after even explaining it partially you will trust me when I say that under this new theory the concept of artists being exploited by audiences does not look to me like a definition of workers, and looks like a definition of capitalists.
Is this an accusation? No. Regardless of what I say about Stalin or Trotsky I believe that all ideologies first exist in parallel according to their own rules. So, while I do not fully reject the model as one that could never be correct, I think that definitionally, a model of artists being "compressed by audiences like workers" is not a model that belongs to Marxism, but one that belongs to the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition. The Existentialist-Structuralist tradition believes (with variations) that everyone is united by being self-aware subjects before they are workers or capitalists, and all progressive movements begin with the universal rights of individuals. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, believe that movements happen when individuals spontaneously form into an uncountable process of Rhizome which blobs around like a slime mold looking for more people according to the overall movement's needs, and people being the proletariat has absolutely nothing to do with it at all - unless the movement just happens to be about workers.
Am I saying "stop pretending to be a Marxist"? Maybe. Perhaps. Just not very angrily.
Have I defined myself as also technically a capitalist by virtue of the fact I'm writing a book and thrashing hard to try to claim the right to think? Maybe. But at least I'm very aware of it. I'm aware of the need for all creative types and authors to be a lot more humble about the act of creating than any of them are right now, and open to the possibility that none of them have the inherent right to create or spread around anything, that perhaps it's really the surrounding world authors need to respect rather than the surrounding world that needs to respect authors. Authors create every artifact in the library, in the classroom, and in the university, and they don't ask anybody what they actually want to be educated in or what they want to understand. People's opinions about these artifacts aren't necessarily something you find in the library or the bookstore. Isn't there a certain irresponsibility in that? The owner of a set of words gives you the only viewpoint on those words, and if the creator hasn't sold the words as a business territory, then the business territory owner is the creator.
I'd love to hear you talk about AI use in art
The claim that 3DWI uses resources from the real world is never substantiated, is it?
Hi! This is a great video. What are your pronouns?
nobody cares
He/him
@@saroporoggo Oh my god, how fragile you are that you feel the need to voice your disdain for my performance of a common courtesy that was not even partially directed at you.
@@NightmareMasterclass Thank you ^v^
mittens moment?
mittens!! :O
yippee!!
I dunno, man, it's not that mittens.
OMG PYRO TOOK SO LONG THAT TONY MADE PETSCOP 2
You put FAR more thought into the plot than the creator did. Furthermore, you make wild claims about the human brain which amounts to science fiction. In reality our understanding of how the human brain works as a system is mostly a mystery. Even going so far as to call the brain a “computer” puts too many preconceived notions onto it; calling the brain’s function ANYTHING like a LLM doing “pattern recognition” is straight up science fiction.
Oh yeah, we fetishizing consumerism w this one.
49:14 "How do objective processes translate into subjective experience."
The being with those objective processes has to translate them _somehow._ Human beings (and likely many other animals with bigger brains) do this by creating a self that experiences those processes. Evolutionary this has proven to be a good survival strategy, which is the reason why we now have this phenomena called "qualia."
Really, I have no idea why philosophers think this is a hard question. To me it feels like they just want to over-complicate things just because.
Babe wake up Petscop 2 just released!
mittens 🎉