RND/ To consider a study of perhaps the ultimate expression of how Youtube video thumbnails almost never accurately and-or truthfully reflect the actual poverty of the Video Reality:
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Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
– Guy Debord
In which, for the past two solid weeks on Youtube – which is often like an entire year online – images of impossibly buxom young women have been displayed front and center. Something ironically to do with electronic music called ‘deep house’, though the algorithmically chosen thumbnails are about as shallow and obvious as its possible to be.
No doubt the creator of these videos is selling the idea of some fantastical, white people island escape bullshit where such ridiculously proportioned women roam free and unencumbered by notions of terminal skin cancer – or indeed any thoughts whatsoever. “Brainzz.” Existing merely to pose. A nonplace (utopia) where one may dance once’s (actual) Shitty Covid Lockdown Life away to the strained electronic strains of repetitive dance muzak while sipping on a chilled half pineapple (from Sainsburys.)
Rather than liberating, such images seem thoroughly depressing. Almost like they’re symbolic adverts for an aspirational millionaire lifestyle without care (for anyone else) or concern (for the actual horror that is white tourism.) That is, not only do the video thumbnails deliberately fail to reflect the video’s actual contents – sure, no real surprise there – but they also ideologically fail to represent the true poverty *implied* by such Capitalist Love-Island-Hopping, women exploiting images.
That particular (eternally falsely-elated) world seems utterly dead, perhaps was always zombified – and can go politely fuck off in any case.
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// how to play big science