Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "House of the Dragon shows how monsters are made"

🐲❓ So, who do you want to win?

That's the question I put at the centre of this one -- a House of the Dragon video covering all three seasons, up to the latest episodes. Yes, having recovered from the later-seasons GoT burnout I'm back on board for more politicking in Westeros and I'm just in time..

But everyone in the Dance thinks they're right. They all have claims, wounds, dead children, stolen futures. And somehow, one compromise at a time, almost all of them become monsters.

So this is a video about how that happens. I thought "power corrupts" was a little too easy, and several of these characters start becoming monsters when they have no power at all. Instead, we can look at how character shows in what we do rather than what we claim, how our enemies can shape what we become, and how the noblest causes (for my family, for the dead, for the future) are exactly the ones that stop answering to the living.

Along the way we look at: Aristotle on habit, Nietzsche on fighting monsters, and -- a philosopher I never expected to bring to Westeros -- Simone Weil on force, attention, and who actually pays the price.

There's also a defence of Viserys as a genuinely good king, a case for a certain other Targaryen as the best monarch Westeros never had, and my honest confession about which character I actually root for (which undermines the entire video and I completely stand by it).

If you've watched the show, I'd love to hear from you in the comments: who do you want to win -- and does your favourite survive our philosophical trial?

9 hours ago | [YT] | 6

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "You've already been to Mars"

In 1965, Mars died.

Not the planet -- the dream of it. Mariner 4 sent back the first real photographs, and the Mars of canals and old gods and Bradbury's crystal cities turned out to be barren rock. Every writer who loved that romantic Mars had to decide what to do with the grief. Philip K. Dick, writing in the shadow of those photographs, did something perverse: he wrote about a bored little clerk who can't afford to go there, so he buys the memory of having already been.

That story is "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," and it's where Total Recall came from — which we covered last week. This week we go back to the source, and I want to make the case that the original is stranger and sadder than anything Hollywood has managed to build on top of it. It's about a man whose fake holiday turns out to be real, whose real life turns out to be the cover story, and who cannot be saved, erased, or reprogrammed -- because the one thing nobody can take from him is what he most deeply desires.

That became the argument of the video. You can wipe a memory,, but you can't erase the shape of a person's wanting. Identity isn't the archive of what you remember; it's what you keep reaching for, unbidden, even when you've been given every reason to stop.

The story is short and freely available online, and it's worth twenty minutes of your life. Read it first if you can. Then come and argue with me in the comments!

And tell me: if they erased everything you remember, would you still be you?

1 week ago | [YT] | 26

Phil0bot

🤖❓ We've officially run out of questions for Phil0chat! Meaning I need your help, by asking me more. They can be philosophical, or really anything on your mind that has been triggered by something on the channel. Or something that has been on your mind more generally; really there's no limit!

-- You can ask me how my House of the Dragon rewatch is going (rough start, getting better);
-- videos that I really want to make that I just don't have the time for and would take forever (The Good Place);
-- which philosopher we can't live without that I wish we could (Heidegger);
-- The most famous philosopher I have met (a secret!).

What, why am I answering questions here? I should save them for the phil0chat! But you can ask anything really. Questions can be on the shorter end (helps with the video), or ramble-y if you can't help it. I am very much the latter myself.

And just a reminder that although the Phil0chat videos are for channel members here (basically because of the algorithm, YouTube hates them); they will always be free over at Patreon ( www.patreon.com/phil0bot).

Thanks, as always, for your great questions and your support. It keeps the channel running, and me going too.

1 week ago | [YT] | 47

Phil0bot

🤖🔴 Did you know there was a red pill before the very famous, very Matrix-ey red pill we all know and are now sick of? It's in Total Recall! I mean I suppose I knew it too at some point.

But it's a film that I absolutely watched years ago, (I even remember the crass TV ads for it, yes that scene) and in true Total Recall style I've completely forgotten that it contained that very scene and trope. Which is a crime, because it's great (in my view, the original and the best). So strap yourself in -- because that's just level 1 in this whole wilderness of mirrors we're exploring today.

And then there's the world's most hated philosophy, which unfortunately is pretty helpful in making sense of a surprisingly deep action film. And there's Lyotard, Frankfurt, Latour, and Bernard Williams for all of their stans out there!

Plus, the hard question: how can you be a good person, when everyone is trying to sell you on something? Well, for once, our most hated philosophy is actually quite helpful...

See you in the comments -- we have much to discuss. Including whether Total Recall has a happy ending. (And it's nice to complete the trilogy on the channel, too.)

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 18

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "I was wrong about the most philosophical novel ever written."

So, you remember that video where I made sixteen novels fight to the death to find the most philosophical novel ever written? Yeah, that was a huge mistake. Because it turns out I'm an idiot with the memory of a goldfish.

And I discovered this in the best way possible: through comments on the internet! Problem is, many of them made good points. And I have to admit that I may have made a few mistakes... including perhaps the initial winner of our tournament. So in this video, I try to set things right by:

- Attacking the literature of a whole country;

- Declaring a hugely popular novel not philosophical enough;

- Taking shots at Alain de Botton;

- And much more!

I think that should make everyone happy, and lead to absolutely no infuriated comments about David Foster Wallace or Middlemarch at all. And I'm never wrong about these things.

So I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope you enjoy this follow up -- because, being sincere for a minute, it was a blast to make and I love the discussion. It turns out the whole thing was really about the debates we had along the way.

And thanks again for your support, it keeps me going. Happy reading!

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 21

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "RoboCop and the self you're losing."

Yes, a new video -- and it's a slightly strange one, because it's the second video I've made about RoboCop. I didn't plan a two-parter, but the film wouldn't let me leave, and this one goes somewhere quite different from the first.

The first RoboCop video was about what capitalism wanted. This one is about Murphy -- and it picks a small fight with the way the film ends. Because RoboCop closes on what looks like a triumph: a man who's spent two hours forgetting himself finally says his own name. "Murphy." Music swells, everyone smiles, roll credits. Lovely. Except ... what, exactly, just said that? Alex Murphy, somehow alive? A machine that's learned to say a dead man's name? Some third thing wearing him like a costume?Because the film ends on a man saying his name, and the man's been dead since about the half-hour mark.

So this one's about identity -- the oldest, dustiest question in philosophy, but thrown in to stark relief by Verhoeven's classic. There's the Ship of Theseus, with a Hobbes twist. There's Locke getting demolished by one poetic line of dialogue ("I can feel them, but I can't remember them"), which still gets me. There's the gun twirl, and what it means that the body remembers before the mind does. And there's a turn at the end about why none of this is really about a robot -- it's about the way we all get rebuilt, by tools and jobs and systems we didn't exactly agree to, into selves we didn't exactly choose.

It's the companion to the first RoboCop video, and part of the accidental Videodrome/They Live/RoboCop trilogy that's now somehow four videos long. Maths was never my strong suit.

Looking forward to your insights and counter-arguments in the comments!

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 28

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "RoboCop knew what capitalism wanted."

Yes, there's a new video (sorry, running a bit late this week). And I think this might be the one I'm most pleased with in the whole 80s run, as it has turned into an accidental Videodrome/They Live/Robocop trilogy.

It's Verhoeven's 1987 classic, RoboCop. And it picks a small fight with the way almost everyone remembers the film -- as the story of a man turned into a machine. Which it is. But I don't think that's what it's actually about, and the giveaway is the scene you already have in your head: the boardroom, ED-209, and poor Kinney getting accidentally aerated despite complying with at least fifteen seconds to spare.

Because ED-209 is what OCP actually wanted -- order enforced with no wage, no conscience, no widow, and nobody who might one day refuse. RoboCop only exists because that dream misfired and they needed a stopgap. Our hero, the guy on the poster, is Plan B. The Plan A, the dream, was a city with no workers in it at all.

So there's Marx in here, briefly. There's the cops, who I think the film is unusually kind to. There's the homecoming scene, which still gets me every single time and which I make no apology for going on about. Plus, I don't think this is an "old film predicted the future" video, because it didn't predict anything. It just understood what people who run things have always wanted, and what capital incentivises. That's a much older and much more significant story, because it's the one we're living in.

So tell me honestly in the comments: if your boss could swap you for an ED-209 tomorrow -- kinks and all -- do you reckon they would? Ah, what am I saying, of course they would. Phil0bot would swap me in a second!

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

1 month ago | [YT] | 25

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "They Live knew the yuppie would win."

This one's about John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic -- Roddy Piper, sunglasses, a six-minute fight in an alley, and being all out of bubblegum. It's a movie almost everyone has seen at least once, and which almost nobody seriously argues with. It's great.

But I want to argue with it. Or rather, I want to argue with most of what's been said about it -- including by you-know-who.

Because there's a section on Slavoj Žižek's reading of the sunglasses and the fight, which is the famous one, and which I think is half right. There's a longer section on the alley fight, which I think the philosophy has been getting wrong for thirty years -- Frank isn't refusing to look because freedom hurts. Frank is refusing because he's got a wife and two kids and ultimately he's a human being, and Nada is asking him to throw all of that away on the word of a stranger with a magic trick. There's Mark Fisher on why the film feels worse every year. And there's a question about a particular kind of person Carpenter saw clearly in 1988 -- a person we used to call a yuppie -- and what happened to them.

The film is a warning Carpenter once called a documentary. I think he's right.

And if you've ever wondered why the alt-right keep stealing this film, that's in there too. I have a theory. It's mildly amusing.

So, do you remember the yuppie? Or did you have to look it up? Tell us about it in the comments!

1 month ago | [YT] | 17

Phil0bot

🤖📚 I have made a huge mistake.

A while back, in a video about philosophers who tried to write novels, I confessed that some of them really shouldn't have. Then someone in the comments asked, fairly enough, about the reverse -- what about the novelists who do philosophy? Better than the philosophers do, even? And without fully thinking through what I was agreeing to, I said yes.

It turns out there are too many. Far too many. I lost most of a month trying to wrestle the list down to something manageable, and the only sensible response I could think of was to put sixteen of them in a tournament bracket and make them fight each other. Cross-seeded. Three rounds. Categories named after the kinds of people who won't shut up about each book at parties.

So that's our latest very serious, highly philosophical video! "The most philosophical novel ever written." It is, technically, an answer to the question. It is also probably the most ridiculous thing I have made on this channel, and also perhaps the best thing (I am quite proud of it, cheating and all).

Most importantly -- you're absolutely going to disagree. And I absolutely want to hear about it.

1 month ago | [YT] | 34

Phil0bot

🤖📣 NEW VIDEO: "You're living inside a 1983 horror movie"

Finally, it's time to dive into Videodrome!


It's David Cronenberg. It's 1983. There's James Woods, Debbie Harry, a guy with a VHS slot in his stomach. It was a flop on release, became a cult classic, and somewhere in the last decade or so became one of those films people keep calling a prophecy. Forty-three years on, that's starting to feel about right -- though not for the reasons most people who say it have in mind.

For me, this video is about why the film keeps fitting whatever decade it arrives in. There's a corporation called Spectacular Optical, a CEO called Barry Convex who plans to cleanse North America from inside an eyeglass company, a televangelist's daughter who runs a homeless shelter where the residents watch TV as therapy, and a man whose body slowly turns into ... well, a few things actually.

It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a gloriously fun film. Brian O'Blivion. A corporate product launch that begins as a Renaissance pageant and somehow ends with sequinned showgirls. The breathing TV. The fleshgun. Every ten minutes Cronenberg does something no other film has ever done, and most of the time he does it without breaking a sweat.

What the video does is walk through it with you -- properly, the iconic moments and the freaky stuff and the bits people forget -- and work out why this strange, smart late night horror movie has aged the way it has. We get into Lacan and the gap, Foucault and biopower, Deleuze and the societies of control, the loneliness economy, and why every government in the world is suddenly nervous about TikTok.

Tell me what you thought in the comments!

1 month ago | [YT] | 16