0:00 On November 9th, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked one of the most dramatic moments of political change in modern history. For nearly three decades, the wall had divided the city of Berlin and symbolized the broader ideological split of the Cold War between the Soviet-aligned East Germany and the democratic West Germany. But in the months leading up to its collapse, hundreds of thousands of East Germans began protesting across the country, especially in the weekly Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, demanding freedom to travel and democratic reforms. As the protests grew and the government struggled to contain them, officials announced that travel restrictions would be lifted. Within hours, massive crowds gathered at the wall and overwhelmed border guards eventually opened the checkpoints. People climbed onto the concrete barrier and began chipping pieces away with hammers. Over the following months, large sections of the wall were dismantled as
0:48 the East German government collapsed under the pressure of mass, but largely peaceful, protests. When we reflect on protests or revolts or movements of the past, we tend to view them as something tangible, something that genuinely sparked the change that protesters wanted to see. Sure, the past is littered with stories of protesters who tried and failed, but success stories like this were happening almost any time the people of a nation or state got so fed up with the current regimes that they felt like they had no other choice but to act. Today, I'd argue that most people feel hopeless and that there's nothing we can effectively do to revolt against the obviously evil forces of authoritarian governments and big tech corporations. But what if I told you that was their intention all along? Some of the greatest minds of previous generations predicted this, that we
1:36 would become so sedated with entertainment and information that all we would do is complain among ourselves instead of gaining class consciousness. So in this video, I want to explain how we got here, why it feels like every protest or revolt is ineffective, and what it might actually take to start seeing the change that most of us want to see in the world. There's a phrase that dates all the way back to around 100 AD attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal, Bread and Circuses In the Roman Empire, rulers used massive public entertainment like gladiator contests and chariot races along with free grain to keep citizens happy and prevent civil unrest. Seeing what was going on, Juvenal used the term as a negative metaphor to explain what happens when citizens sedate themselves
2:21 with pleasure and comfort. As he puts it in Satire X, the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else now concerns itself no more and longs eagerly for just two things, bread and circuses. Learning from writings like these and comparing them to his own time period, English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley warned citizens about the danger of too much pleasure, updated for the modern age in his 1923 essay, Pleasures, published in Vanity Fair. I highly recommend everyone watching this to read that short essay, but I'm just gonna pull the most important and relevant passages from that to keep this video succinct. Huxley begins his essay by clarifying the enemy of our restlessness and depression. The dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers, wild men, wars, and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers
3:10 are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man. In other words, like I've said in previous videos, the wars our generation are fighting are less physical, although that statement holds a bit less weight at the moment, and more spiritual than anything else. Modern pleasures have gotten, quote, progressively more imbecile, such that actually using our brains to accomplish important tasks is almost entirely optional. Huxley observed this over a century ago now. He argued that distractions used to require at least a baseline level of intellectual effort and passion. For example, in the 17th century, royal families would listen to sermons and academical disputes regarding theology and metaphysics. The common people engaged in the exercise of a certain intelligence, too. Their form
3:56 of entertainment included intricate plays, and they were able to comprehend works like Othello and Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Huxley also explains how peasants went through traditional rites like dances and ceremonies. As he puts it, their pleasures were intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves. Now, the majority of the pleasures we engage with are less participatory and more passive. For Huxley's generation, this meant things like the gramophone, otherwise known as a record player, the press, where news was filled with democratized information that did not require much thinking, and watching sports rather than playing them. It's pretty funny that Huxley and other thinkers at the time saw people using a record player as something that was making them dumber, and it just goes to show that there is a bit of nuance with this, that not all advancements in
4:43 technology making things easier, like listening to music, is necessarily damaging like Huxley seemed to have thought it was, and that's where I would disagree. Like, I do think just a little bit of what he was saying was basically, oh, anything that makes something easier and more accessible is poison to the mind. But I do think he really does hit on a few great points for contemporary entertainment. Today, the smartphone has combined just about every single form of pleasure and entertainment you could think of into a pocketable device that we keep with us at all times. This has a myriad of negative consequences, of course. Social media makes us depressed and anxious, burnt out, and disrupts our sleep. Any sexual fantasy you desire is at your fingertips. There's not a one-to-one connection between you and the necessities of life because it's all been
5:31 streamlined for convenience. These are all things that I've talked about at length on this channel, right? But what I want to talk about specifically is what happens to our ability to revolt when we drowned ourselves in mindless stimulation. Firstly, social media encourages what I would call a portrayal of bad stuff to bad stuff actually happening pipeline. We tend to read more about bad news than good news because we're wired to seek negative information, so the algorithms reflect that, and we feel bad and powerless about what's happening in the world that may or may not be portrayed accurately. Then we go and talk to our friends about it. If we can't find any sort of mutual agreement about happy stuff happening in the world, at least we can all agree that the world sucks right now, right? Well then, that inevitably is going to affect the mood that we carry into our real-life interactions. We think things are really
6:18 bad, partly because they actually are, but also partially because we're fed an immensely unnatural amount of bad stuff, so things actually do get worse. This cycle repeats itself indefinitely until a force strong enough to change it steps in, but that force rarely gets the opportunity to step in due to the second reason that social media affects our revolts, which is something that I already briefly touched upon, which is emotional numbness through overstimulation. You see, there's something very powerful that happens when we don't fill up every ounce of free time we have with doom scrolling. When you don't consume a podcast with headphones on every single time you step outside for a walk, when you don't scroll while your water bottle is filling up, when you don't default to TikTok or Instagram reels every time something bad happens in your life to escape the reality of
7:05 that bad thing, patterns in your life start to emerge. Problems once thought to be unsolvable slowly figure themselves out in your head when you allow your mind space to breathe. When you give your brain time to process the amount of stimuli you consumed in two hours that would have been enough to kill a Victorian child, you start to realize something. You start to realize, wait a second, there actually are tangible ways out of this shitty situation. And come to think of it, I'm actually enraged that I'm in this situation in the first place, and what are the forces that be, the systemic issues that are causing me to feel so shitty? As much as some people might disagree, anger and being completely fed up with where you are and how the world works is often the only way to get pushed to the point where
7:50 people will actually start to do something that elicits positive change. And that cannot happen if you are heavily sedated through modern forms of escapism like social media, pornography, and a video game addiction. I'm not against video games by the way, but they are very easy to get addicted to and slip into for hours and hours at a time to just escape a shitty situation that you might have the power to change. The next thing that this pleasure, specifically social media, has spread is this collective view that protesting and demonstrating, getting yourself out there in that way, is inherently performative or just seen as a virtue signal. Now there's undoubtedly a lot of influencers out there who post about some tragedy that's happened in the world not to raise awareness but to act like they give a shit. Just wanted to come on
8:37 here and say I do stand for what's right and what's right right now is black lives do matter and white people do have white privilege so it's unfortunate but um fill the comments with a fist and spread the positivity and love. Let's go. But I fear that social media has turned the act of revolting into something that is seen as cringe-worthy or too try hard in nature. If you do actually care, it's often automatically labeled as performative because the way protests and other forms of revolt are portrayed on social media is usually through the lens of comedy, memes, or insults. Something adjacent to this that really grinds my gears these days is when people say they aren't political. I'm not gonna lie, up until like a few years ago, this was kind of me. I thought caring about politics was just another psyop that didn't
9:22 really change anything and you're just trying to make yourself seem right. And I'm sure there's a lot of that, but like, everybody is political, okay? The whole thing about not being political is a psyop. The fact that you think you cannot be political about something, and I'm not saying I agree with the two-party system, I think it is, you know, it's not a good system, but saying you are not political is the PSYOP saying you don't care about politics and being fed up with the world is a contradiction. Trust me, big government,
10:19 loves hearing you say stuff like that, because it reinforces another reason why we all complain but nothing actually changes. The extreme divide between the average citizen. We've gotten to the point where sharing different opinions from someone is immediately labeled as wrong and a threat to another person, because productive dialogue is simply incompatible on these platforms that encourage rage-baiting and quick, incomplete hits of misinformation. Everybody thinks they have the true, objective, correct answer to all of society and the world's problems, and nobody wants to listen to anyone else's solution that doesn't confirm their pre-existing beliefs. Getting into useful debates and discussions that actually promote some sort of change requires some of that space that I talked about earlier. It requires you to sit, think, and conceptualize your argument,
11:08 to strengthen it and articulate it in a good way, without immediately saying, This thing bad. This thing good. And instead of collectively coming together to fight our common enemy, big tech and authoritarian governments, we start blaming trivial matters like minorities or other people who don't look or think like us. Like, I promise you, dude, the reason that you get paid pennies for your 9 to 5 and you come home miserable and goon for one hour isn't because your favorite hockey team is celebrating Pride Month. That is exactly the type of thing that these big corporations want you to get mad at because it keeps us fighting among each other instead of coming together, and social media has been an incredible tool for reinforcing that division. And I'm not saying that entertainment itself is the enemy. Humans have been entertaining themselves since the dawn
11:56 of time to escape the hardships of life. Like, we always are going to need a temporary bout of escapism in some healthy form to... to keep going in life, man. Like, sometimes we need to forget who we are and escape into some form of entertainment. That's a really important aspect of life. It's these contemporary forms of entertainment and spectacle that are psychologically designed to keep you scrolling, exhausted, distracted, and angry that are the problem. And this is why I feel most of our efforts to create meaningful change in the world fall short. These new forms of entertainment have made it feel like no matter what we do or no matter how hard we try, Nothing is going to change, so the safest thing to do is retreat back into the comfort of distraction. Now we scroll, we laugh at the absurdity of
12:43 it all, we complain to our friends, and then we move on to whatever next video, outrage, or algorithm the feed presents us with, blaming our circumstances on things that have nothing at all to do with them, confusing and dividing us even further. So how do we actually start moving shit in a positive direction? If forces we can't see or hear that are unreachable, yet we know are there, are intentionally making the lives of the average person more unenjoyable and less stable, How do we break down a Berlin Wall that we cannot see? Well, firstly, and I already stressed this a bit, you have to have the capacity to get emotional enough and fed up enough to actually want to do something about it. Things are going to feel just okay enough if you keep engaging with mindless distraction that either numbs
13:30 you to the systemic issues you know are affecting you or makes you feel hopeless because a lot of that stimulation is just bad news without any tangible solution. As cringe and cliche as it sounds, problems don't feel like problems until you sit with them in silence. That's why when you lay your head down on the pillow at night, your head won't shut up about everything that's wrong with your current life because it's finally given the space to talk to you about those things. I'm calling myself out here too, by the way. Secondly, there needs to be a greater call to action after awareness. Now this isn't to say that protesting, getting out there, making some sort of sign, and making a certain movement more aware is ineffective. It absolutely does raise awareness and brings to light some issues that people maybe weren't
14:20 even aware of, and then maybe that makes enough of them fed up to actually join in on the movement too. But often there isn't a clear sense of direction or solution after the fact. Another YouTube creator, Deja, made a great video on this topic where she discussed how protesting actually isn't meant to be the solution. It's only meant to agitate, disrupt, and bring people together. But after the fact, people often just revert back to regular life as if nothing happened because they're not really sure what to do next. So first, let's just talk about, on an individual level, what you can do right now by yourself. Here's what I would tell you to do. Start boycotting the shit that you think is ruining the world. You think AI is making people dumber and spreading misinformation? Cancel your ChatGPT subscription. Do you hate seeing these social media companies make millions off of these five second ads in between 20 seconds of
15:09 scrolling and blasting your retinas with stupid stimulation? Then delete the apps or try to use them as little as possible. Find out all the consumer products that these companies own, which is almost fucking all of them, and try to not engage or buy anything from them as much as is reasonably possible. Secondly, we and you need leverage. Again, this is something Deja emphasized, but power does not accrue from simply getting more and more people to join a movement. You need leverage from people who have the power to actually sustain those movements and enact the changes. A huge part of the reason stuff like labor movements or the civil rights movement and even the fall of the Berlin Wall succeeded in the past was because they
15:56 negotiated contracts, filed lawsuits, pushed legislation, and built networks that could sustain pressure for years. Mutual aid was also an incredibly important aspect of most of these. When workers went on strike in the early 20th century, they didn't just walk off the job and hope things would work out. They had unions, and those unions built strike funds to help workers pay for food and rent while they weren't receiving wages. They organized community kitchens, their families supported one another. That's the sort of infrastructure that allows these strikes and protests to last for weeks and months or even years, which is sometimes how long it takes to force these companies or the government to negotiate contracts and actually enact the change. Leverage is what turns this outrage into consequence,
16:43 because without it, it just runs the risk of being symbolic. It runs the risk of being a movement where people are having awareness raised about this thing and we think, yeah, it's really bad, but no one actually has the power to reach the institutions that are required to reach in order for something to happen. If you're looking for those communities and infrastructures that do possess some of that power, the first place to start is local, and the internet can actually be an incredibly useful tool here if you use it with a specific goal in mind instead of just consuming whatever gets thrown at you. Start by searching for organizations in your city that are already working on the issue you care about. If you're sick of housing costs in your city, type out tenant union plus your city into Google. If you're fed up
17:30 with people in your community struggling to afford basic necessities, search mutual aid plus your city. If you're frustrated with wages, workplace conditions, or job security, search labor union plus your city. Most cities already have some form of these groups, and many of them operate through websites, email lists, or something like Slack or Discord, where they coordinate their real-world action. Another thing you can use the internet for is to identify who actually has influence over the issue you're concerned about. If it's a company, look up their major clients, investors, or partnerships. If it's a local policy, find out which council members or committees are responsible for it. If it's a landlord or development company, see which properties they own and which banks finance them. Then, once you've mapped out who actually holds influence, you have somewhere concrete to direct your attention. As far as eliciting change
18:19 on a grander scale, trying to take down the ultra-rich, the biggest corporations, you would need some insane level of leverage. But to be honest, those smaller local movements is what influences the larger movements, the more global movements of change. I'm telling you, things are not hopeless in our digitized, hyper-reality, apathetic, overpriced world. I'm sure that you've spent at least some sort of time thinking about a world in which we use all of these technological advancements to benefit the greatest amount of people, and I don't think it's as far off as you might think. You just need to be fucking inspired. more on a daily basis, man, to get that juice and that energy to fucking stand up and do something about life. Get involved
19:08 in something greater than yourself. Join clubs. Engage with different forms of art. Taste the flavors of life. Help a stranger face your problems instead of escaping them for another day and allowing them to grow worse. I'm gonna sound sappy here, I don't give a shit. You are capable of way more than you could ever imagine, and I truly believe that. If you feel like you are not getting the power that you feel like you deserve in a certain area of life, you need either creative movement or join a movement with the power to attain that power. Identify the source of your unfulfillment and the people you care about, find the communities, find the pressure points, and start the change. Channel those emotions. that you're fucking fed up with shit, into something positive. Do not let big tech and authoritarian regimes drain the
19:57 joy out of human existence. Holding hope and optimism is your greatest act of rebellion against these chuds, and actually doing something about these forces is possible. Everything's gonna be good and cool, but it's probably gonna get at least a little bit worse before things get really cool, but it might not take as much time if you actually do something about it after this video. Let me know your thoughts on what I just talked about, maybe fill in some gaps that I didn't talk about at all that you think would be useful information. And thank you for watching.
