hello and welcome back to another video. Today we're going to talk about something that is extremely relevant to today's media culture. You might not be aware of it, but based on some of my recent observations combined with my kind of niche interest in literary theory, today we're going to basically talk about this idea of how critique has slowly turned into the mood and the language of the internet. I'm going to run you through a bunch of points, and in this video, we're going to have a long and hard chat about this. And of course, at the end of the video, I'm going to open the floor up to you guys to have a really good discussion in the comment section down below. But nevertheless, a few qualifiers before we start. And in case you're watching this for the very first time, in case this is the first video of mine that you're watching, my name is Robin Wden. And recently, I have just finished a thesis that's looking at some of the literary theories or critical theories of the 1980s.

that's basically my specialization, and what ended up happening was, you know, whatever you're researching in the academy, you want to keep them in a nice and pristine little box. But sometimes, if you're researching something as volatile as critical theory, it inevitably explodes out of its box. And I think it's starting to conceptualize some of the things that I've been seeing on the internet lately. And of course, I work on the internet, so I think this video is a natural conclusion that kind of combines two spheres that I'm working on together. So I'm super excited to share it. And without further ado, let me tell you something about what I've been going through as of late. So the story or this investigation of looking into critique as an idea for my thesis, it all started with this really weird occurrence that I've discussed with my therapist a few months ago. Basically, some of you guys are probably university students, so you can relate to this at your core. Because sometimes when a semester starts, when a workload gets a bit nuts, you also tend

to go a bit nuts together with a workload, and one of the early symptoms of this going nuts is going to be sleep deprivation or insomnia, and that's exactly what I ended up contracting when I started writing this thesis 6 months ago. At first, it was okay. I felt a little bit tired throughout the day, I wasn't as motivated to do work, but then after a few months, it really started to get on my nerves. The first symptom of it was I started to feel really annoyed with everything and everybody around me. And of course, that sense of annoyance, my god, when that annoyance is combined with a bit of um, bit of acquired knowledge, those are basically the two key ingredients of being, wait for it, a critic. Because on the one hand, the shitty mood sets up the condition for you to find fault in everything. And of course, with uh, sort of like this acquired knowledge because I was dealing with quite heavy concepts, I was able to use these concepts to justify all the

fals that I picked with everything so I eventually ended up in this really precarious situation where you know when you're really pissed off about something and to justify the fact that you're pissed off about it you tend to want to elevate yourself above happy people. Is it just me or when you're really pissed off about something you tend to do this thing also because sometimes you're so miserable to admit that you are miserable. It's easy to criticize people who are content because you can't stomach the fact that they can just be content and live their lives. There has to be something wrong with that person, right? There has to be something wrong with that person walking their dock just uh being one of the most content humans in history. But this is actually a temperament that was quite common, so common that buron Russell, the philosopher, ber even gave it a name. He called it a byonic unhappiness. It's basically this subtle preference for suffering through life instead of being

happy because you secretly think suffering gets you closer to some spiritual truth that makes you more elevated than the average joil. But after a little while of dealing with this kind of byonic unhappiness because I just couldn't sleep at night, my girlfriend pointed the sound and it was quite a unflattering realization. She said to me, Robin, you're not a critic, you're just being an. And after a few hours of research and contemplation after the initial shock of getting that sort of description of me as an, I realized that there's a real thin line between being a Critic and an. In a recent New Yorker article titled Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism, the author characterized a modern critic as a contemptible creature who is always quacking of the infirm and diseased parts of books. And if we generalize that definition, critics are basically people who are constantly quacking about pointing out everything that's wrong with the world. Does that sound familiar, or are we describing the

present state of social media right now. Just to put an end to the story of my insomnia, uh, I eventually got a prescription for a white noise machine, which you technically don't need a prescription for, but my therapist told me, just try a white noise machine, that's going to solve 60% of your problems. What ended up happening was I tried it, um, I got mad at myself for not seeing a solution to that problem a little earlier, and I got the inspiration for this article because all of a sudden reality looked very good, reality looked okay. And I'm not arguing that you need a white noise machine to stop critiquing the world, but it essentially points to an essential fact that sometimes you need to criticize the world around you, that is a mood. And speaking of being in a mood to criticize everything around us or to critique everything around us, if there has to be one word or one move to describe Generation Z, which is a lot of us, we're kind of like noticing.

this trend on the internet right now. We are doing our critique on internet. We're making video essays like this one. I think the general mood is that we are suspicious, we're paranoid, and suspicious. Let me explain that real quick. Given the immense influence of how technology allowed narratives to fracture, that allowed Grand stories to basically break down. Now, this generation right now, we are completely immune to platitudes. Things like work hard or Love Thy Neighbor, invest now so you can rest on your laurels later. These things we tend to regard them with a kind of distance and suspicion, or we can always find some sort of hidden incentive behind it. You know, this person's trying to sell me something, that person's trying to talk this person up to maintain their homeostasis or maintain their status quo. And if we combine all these reactions to these different forms of media around us, we basically don't want to trust anything that's presented to us on a silver platter, and we're basically operating under the assumption that anything could be propaganda.

anything could be delusional thinking so we better be, we better be real vigilant about this. And what this creates is kind of a mood that's real suspicious, that's real vigilant, that's able to pick out faults with certain content that we see on the internet, which is well warranted in some cases. And I think all of this could be traced back to a fear of being deluded when you open up a Tik Tok reel. And when you get that urge to criticize something, there's always the sense of like, yeah, I am stepping away from The Narrative of this Tik Tok. I'm real critical in my thinking abilities. I am going to point out this flaw in this Tik Tok because I'm not one of those deluded people who's praising this Tik Tok. And over time, we become less and less liberal with praise because we start to associate happy emotions or praise or anything else with the sense of being diluted, and we don't want to be deluded because frankly big media has us.

up so many times. There's so much fake news that right now, as a generation, we don't know what to believe in anymore. So of course, we're going to have this temperament of like, we're going to pick everything apart, we can take nothing for granted. And over time, this morphed into a mood and an attitude, not unlike the mood that you're going to be in when you're sleep deprived. But in this case, it goes a lot deeper. It turned into a suspicious attitude for us to read certain things. And just like that bonic unhappiness that we talked about, you know, a few minutes ago, this suspicious attitude is nothing new. And this is one of the greatest things that you can do with uh with history, is that you notice something that you're doing, and you can trace it back. And there's always another person, we're not a generation of people who's already done what you've done, so nothing's new under the sun. This attitude was first articulated by the French philosopher Paul Rer as the

hermeneutics of Suspicion. Let's break this term down real quick. Hermeneutics of Suspicion sounds like some academic mumbo jumbo, but if you take it apart, it's actually quite easy to understand. Hermeneutics comes from the Greek root that means interpretation, and suspicion basically means the mood of that interpretation. If you put them together, it just means a suspicious attitude when it comes down to interpreting something. And this attitude, according to colored a lot of the cynicism that was happening in the 20th century with literary Theory especially. You can verify this for yourself. Head over to your local bookstore, find a cultural studies section, find something that was written by a notable critic in the 20th century or late 20th century especially. You're going to notice this kind of like need to unveil things, and you're also going to notice that primarily a lot of this works sought to draw out the context behind specific ideologies. They really want to get to the bottom of

things because well maybe just like us, they were so sick of being diluted by mainstream media. They're so sick of being diluted by Technologies of control and repression, so they simply had no choice but to unveil things, to use their Theory to criticize things, and a key role of the critic throughout that period, and sometimes nowadays too, and this is why uh the role of a culture critic is kind of experiencing a Resurgence right now on substack count on YouTube is to unveil the hidden forces that are subtly driving us, is to make video essays about things that normal people don't tend to see, but it's up to the critic to use their intellect to make us see these things, and I would argue this is the main attitude behind a lot of these video essays that you see on YouTube. A lot of the base assumption is that there's reality and there's probably something that you're picking apart about a piece of media, and there's a hidden reality behind this Veil that you're trying to get to, and I want to

take the Tik Tok Stitch function as an example, and I'm not going to use any illustrations because I technically don't have Tik Tok. I have like two to three clips of my YouTube videos on there, but I kind of run out of patience with it, and I don't want to dive into that rabbit hole. But every time I catch glimpses of the Stitch function, like the Stitch incoming sticker, there's always this sense of the second clip that's reacting to the first clip is more elevated, more objective, has more of a point than the first clip. And if you place the first clip in its position, then the first clip is simply operating on some deluded principle. And have you noticed, especially on Instagram, whenever someone posts something remotely positive or when someone has a big enough following where they post something affirmative, there's always going to be someone in a comment section down below picking that positive affirmation apart, telling them, Well, have you thought about this? Why would you look at it that

way, are you deluded enough into thinking that there's something good that's happening over here? You know, at first we might be able to brush it off and say, you know, those people are just trolls, they're miserable people. But now, as more and more people get on the internet, I feel like it's starting to become a reoccurring theme. It's not just like a few trolls in the comment sections anymore, but it's a grand attitude that's starting to happen. It's an attitude shift from engaging with something positively to engaging with something negatively. And I don't exactly mean positivity and negativity in terms of emotional effects, but I mean it's affirmation versus negation. And I think negation is starting to take over the Internet. And what's really interesting is that this tone of negation, this negativity that's on the internet, it directly parallels the 20th-century attitude in literary criticism. And as Rita Felsky pointed out, critique isn't and it can't really be a sober.

philosophical analysis, and these video essays can't help but to take on oppositional tendencies while being outraged, disillusioned, or out of sorts. And this is what Felsky defined as a kind of professional pessimism when it comes down to critique. In short, their overall sentiment with the Internet is that keep your fluffy and keep your sentimental emotions at the door. We're doing real culture criticism here. Get that out of here. We're doing hard-nosed critique. We're unveiling propaganda. We're exposing fake news. Sit back, relax. Let me spend the next hour telling you how this and this and this and that is wrong. So to bring everything back here, there's a fundamental shift in how we experience content on the Internet. This shifting attitude can be traced back to some of the high theories of the 1980s or the late 20th century that we've inherited. But now, given that the media discourse is a lot more vibrant, we're able to take these attitudes with regards to critique and completely run.

with them. And this is why we've been seeing a resurgence of social critics on Substack, on Instagram, on TikTok, and what have you. Is because this, this act of critique is kind of back. At the same time, it's kind of exciting, but on the other hand, there are some problems with it. And I'm going to try my best to articulate those problems. Well, I agree with all of you guys. There are many things to criticize, and we should continue to keep the cultural discussion going. But there are two things that could potentially be holding you back from being a better critic or being a better social commentator. Number one is this symptom of forming social echo chambers. And this is actually one of the things that I've noticed in my research, which is, um, what happened is that what started off as critical theory gradually turned to a form of ideology in itself. And the best way to illustrate this is through high school cliques. You know, a lot of these alternative groups of people in high school, they used to see

for example, the Goths, the Nerds, these sub-genres of jocks. You know, these people, they band together. You know, they have that identity about them. But the fact that they wanted to be different sort of landed them in another homogeneous social group. So, there's the Grand Paradox. There, by being different, by trying to stand out from the crowd, or by trying to give an alternative perspective on a certain topic, or a different version of critique, you paradoxically would end up yet in another pool of people who agree with you. And with regards to critique, it's really easy to fall into this tendency of critical distance from the thing that you're criticizing. And in the worst-case scenarios, you might be tempted to detach yourself from daily joys. So, you can't enjoy the cup of coffee because it's wrong in five different ways, right? You can't enjoy a nice day out having a picnic because, well, it's wrong to enjoy something. Well, there's so many problems in a world over time if you ban.

yourself with enough of these people who are also in the same Lan way of criticizing or in this act of critique critique. As an idea, it itself could become a stereotype, which is why a lot of the video essays on YouTube, their thumbnails, they all look more or less the same. They're all more or less tackling the same problems, and of course, a lot of the themes have to do with a lot of the theories that that's already being theorized in the 20th century. And there's always this undercurrent of being oppositional against something without realizing that, man, in reality, things are a lot more complicated. And if all we consume are these clips of content that are constantly picking things apart, then we're going to develop the same circuit in our brains to always pick things apart, to always be on the defense, to always find fault within everything. And that's going to morph into a kind of attitude, um, from which we look at the world. And that probably explains why a lot of people are not

very happy right now because they're trapped in this Echo chamber of doing critique all the time, and at the same time they're critiquing themselves for doing this critique, and it just ends up in this never-ending spiral. The queer scholar Eve Cedric gave this tendency of self-reference a really poignant name. She called it paranoid reading because as you are perceiving the world or reading a book or watching a YouTube video, you're already anticipating negative effects, or you're already anticipating something negative from the film, from the scripting, from the dialogue that you can't help but to want to pick it apart before you've even enjoyed a film. And somehow in this case, enjoying takes on a bit of a religious repressive guilt because you don't want to be the deluded one. You always want to be the first one to jump ahead of the content in order to form a theory or form a critique about it. In a sense, you don't want to be humiliated by being one of these bumbly fools who's

really into something problematic. You don't want to risk that humiliation, so you'd rather have a cool and detached attitude toward everything. And I think over time, that's going to permanently reduce your perceptiveness to new mediums of art who are actually pushing the envelope. And I think this attitude gradually forms an echo chamber where we start to self-define ourselves as people who don't like that artist right there, people who are against that filmmaker right there, or people who find XYZ problematic. We're shrinking down to a sample size of her critique because with some mediums, automatically, we want to jump in there with a preconceived negative aect that must be bad. And of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and of course, we're trapped in an echo chamber of critique. Since um, we are already paranoid before even start entertaining that piece of content. So that's one of the problems with this overly paranoid tendency with critique, which is that it's very easy to form Echo Chambers because critique is a mood. It comes before your conceptualization.

since you're already anticipating it, it's really hard to get out of it, and that leads me to the second problem or second thing that's slightly problematic with this notion of totalizing critique, which is that how do you know when to enjoy something if all we have are these streams of criticism, and if all we have is this negative and paranoid attitude toward media, how do we recover that innocent sense of enjoying something for the first time even though we know at a deeper level it probably contains some problematic elements. Again, literary scholar Rita Felski articulated in her book Hooked that this language for describing the love for something or to describe affects, emotions, enjoyment, this language compared to critique is so remarkably underdeveloped that we don't exactly have a whole lot of words to articulate what enjoyment looks like. And based on the arguments outlining professing criticism, this High theory of the '80s, it's going to run its course one day even though right now it's coming out in a different form.

mainstream media. One day is going to face a kind of jaist self-reference where every critique kind of looks the same. Everyone's basically voicing the same opinions. There's going to come a time where your typical video essays is going to start to sound formulaic even though right now there's still elements of novelty within it. But if we just keep doing this all the time, one day we'd have to step back and realize that reading and engaging with a piece of content is such a complicated relationship. There's enjoyment involved, there's criticism involved, there's paranoia involved. You're trying to like jump ahead of the text, but at the same time sometimes a film just simply grips you even though it's problematic. A film forces you to enjoy it even though you can always formulate your conclusions later on about that piece of content. But sometimes affects come first before critique. How do we negotiate this Matrix between enjoyment and critique? How do we recover that sense of enjoyment that we have for certain pieces of media while at the same time be vigilant?

enough to point out everything that's wrong with it. Because right now we're shifting the needle too far towards the other side, and we don't exactly know how to articulate our enjoyment on the internet anymore. Because we're going to get shot down, because critics are going to be in a coms to get us. And I feel like, you know, this is one of the things that I really want to continue making videos about, which is negotiating enjoyment and critique. And of course, I decided to write a whole thesis on this topic. So, um, this is something I'm really passionate about, and I've actually coined a term called Amorous reading in my thesis. And the thesis went into a lot of detail about what I think is the potential solution for criticism versus enjoyment. How do we reconcile affect with the kind of hardness critique that we still get to do even after we enjoy something. So, stay tuned for further episodes if you're interested in this line of thinking. But nevertheless, those are my thoughts on this idea of critique.

and what the culture is up to. Some of my recent observations in conjunction with my research, and I hope that you guys have enjoyed it thoroughly. And I will see you in the next one. Take care and goodbye, and go enjoy something fun.

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