Grillpill: Explained 05.04.20

Missing transcript*This article is missing parts of a transcript. You can help CushBomb Wiki by expanding it.*Copy edit*This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can help CushBomb Wiki by editing it.*
Grillpill: Explained transcript.

Oh there. Hi guys! Sorry about that! Took me a second to get the old internet combobulating.

So hi everyone! So today is actually a fortuitous day for the stream because I've gotten some feedback recently from trusted friends who say that they think what I'm doing here is interesting but that I'm not as legible as maybe I need to be for a general audience whose good faith can't be assumed at every level.

And then I kind of need to reel in a little bit because you know bad faith actors could take things said in the heat of a discussion out of context. And then you know it becomes part of the arsenal of weaponry against Chapo and I respect and love my co-workers very much and I don't want to see them threatened in any way so I'm taking that into consideration. And one of the pieces of advice I got which I understood sort of as you know as a theoretical point but which was hard to really commit to on the stream because I get excited and kind of fly off is to ground things in specific examples.

Like I think the talk about Napoleon we did yesterday where we talk about Napoleon and what he did vis-a-vis you know The Directory and Haiti. I thought that was good I feel like I made some good points relatively and it and more importantly it felt like it was in a vocabulary that was communicable across planes of understanding to people in large enough percentage to be worth pursuing.

So I'm keeping that in mind and fortuitously as I'm getting this feedback this is also the day when I realize a lot of people are saying “Matt what is the Grillpill? Matt, Grillpilled, what does this mean?” and I've realized now oh this is a perfect example this is a perfect opportunity to take a concrete issue and drill down on it. And at every level staying applied to the material focus and not getting spinned off, spun off into into the ideological realm.

So let's talk Grillpilling. Now I started calling myself grillpilled a couple months ago basically as the campaign for Sanders fell apart and as the mummified remains of Imperator Joseph Robinette Biden were strapped to a chariot and led through the forum. And it was my attempt to express my you know pretty much instantaneous disenchantment from the Democratic presidential election because my reasoning in supporting Sanders was that a political campaign of that size and magnitude was the sort of short basic shortcut through the cultural firmament that we needed to get to a discussion of actual material conditions in this country.

And I feel like progress was made on that course. The Bernie Sanders campaign and its proximate goals was, yes, a failure but I feel like it progressed the ball down the court. Now did it progress the goal on the field long enough to be meaningful in the coming crisis point wherever that comes. That's a separate question and that's up to us. But in the moment I knew that the danger there and I could see it happening as soon as Biden became the nominee is that a lot of people who had that energy and had basically offloaded their sense of political purpose in life onto that campaign and the more actual work they did for the campaign maybe the less like unmoored their emotions regarding it would be.

Like people who were on the campaign volunteered for the campaign because they had put so much of themselves into it I feel like they probably were a little bit more you know reasonable about what was happening. But people who were just rooting for it online and investing all their energies in it and we were basically the cheerleaders, like that was our job. Like Amber was doing real work but I know me, I know Felix, I know Will and Virgil, we were cheerleaders. And I think like that's good like cheerleaders have a purpose. I mean they improve the morale of your side and that's not unnecessary.

But when you have all that energy and it's all at the struck at the symbolic level of the presidential campaign and it doesn't relate to your action the danger is you're gonna want to replace that energy at a similar level of abstraction and spectacle and there's nothing comparable to the presidential race. So I could already feel my center of gravity and I could see it happening to others [be] pulled towards let's argue with Biden supporters until the election about why he's not worth voting for and get called “Russian bots” for the next six months. And I just saw it all happening I just thought this is that would be honestly a perverse and monstrous result of the Sanders campaign if people who were, you know, relatively attuned to the material breakdown of this country basically ignored the biggest crisis that it had ever seen in order to invest in owning people who like Biden online and I started doing it immediately even as I was grillpilling.

I said I'm grillpilled it's not my problem but that was partially a weapon to be used against Biden supporters to say you're gonna lose now because we're not voting with your guy and suck it, it was your fault. It was just a way to own them in a different, I was owning them by winning by my guy winning primaries but then that didn’t work anymore there were no more primaries to win so now I'm owning guys virtually by reminding them that in the future they're gonna be owned “yeah you owned me now in this primary” but in November you're gonna be owned by me and that's why I would just post the picture of Robert Downey senior from Boogie Nights at every complaining liberal who was already preparing themselves to blame the Bernie Bros.

I would be like that's not my problem that's not a problem but of course the fact that I felt compelled to post this at everyone I saw, I actually at one point went hunting for Biden supporters to post the guy at, obviously I think it's my problem and I know it's my problem because a Biden presidency very well might be the end of the American political experiment. In real terms I mean a Trump second term might be too but both of them are in a real I could not think of two parties and two people representing two parties less able to deal with the coming situation whatever it turns out to be so it's obviously it's my problem but the psychic cost of being sad that Biden loses that's not my problem.

But obviously I still have anxiety about what's gonna happen because now I needed to post at Biden supporters to own them and that's when I realized, no I have to actually take, and so the grill pill was ironic, you know you guys know the meme of the guy flipping the burgers and he says “Klansmen, racism, politics, I just want to grill for God's sake” of course that was an ironic re-appropriation because there's nothing I cared, not nobody talking about that cares more about what they're talking about that somebody who posts the the grill guy because you're trying to cover up for the knowledge that you are in fact mad and red and nude and owned and all those things that you spend your life terrified for other people to find out about.

It's like I honestly feel like the quarantine helped sort of break my rhythm obviously and made me sort of have to reassert where I was finding value, where I was finding like enjoyment and I realized that grill pill is really an approach to the Internet more than anything and as a as something like as a in general but specifically for younger people who find their politics and hone their politics online. And the essence of grill pill is to log off and grill instead.

And the grilling can be whatever it is that's actually in your life that gives you a sense of satisfaction because all that energy you were expending and I was expending caring about the presidential election which like I said two terrible options like I said things might change Jesse Ventura runs and gets some gas, gets a little bit of tread in the tire and things keep getting worse but barring that. That is a sterile investment you're not going to get anything out anything in your nothing in your life is going to get better by focusing on the presidential election so grill instead and by that I mean focus on something in your life that brings meaning to it but that goes beyond the inter- that goes beyond just caring about the presidential election it goes broader to caring about politics insofar as your “caring about politics” is expressed by going online to talk about them to people and spend more likely to argue with people about them or to make fun of people about them and obviously this is *hilarious* coming from me because I'm one of the Pied Pipers that brought people onto these platforms.

Now I think in retrospect I feel pretty, I feel relatively proud of my position because I honestly do feel like Chapo was the opposite of a Fash pipeline, it was a pipeline away from alienated young white men, from the the lure of the genuinely, genuinely transgressive web right because when you're alienated and you're online and one group of people tells you that you're a too stupid piece of shit who should cut your dick off for being a white male and another group is saying we're gonna make fun of these people who think you suck your commitments at that point which aren't very strong because you're just getting online they harden very quickly.

They harden very quickly and we were an alternative to that. It's like you can still have fun, you can still do jokes, you don't have to be, like, obviously all of those “rad libs” that people hate they were getting the same joy out of the Internet too but their's was in policing, their joy was in suppressing ideas. They thought they were doing a good thing by making other people miserable those people being the white male cis gamergaters but of course for the white male cis gamergators their enjoyment come from annoying those people and that starts just as a desire to antagonize. But over time it gets rolled up with a bunch of other beliefs because you're in contact with people who are all similarly aligned generally in terms of background and racial identification and gender and things like that and those gonna solidify arguments and that's what happened with arguments within the left and between the left and the right online.

It was this sterile contest and it continues to be and it can only be a sterile contest. And the grill pill idea of that I'm coming into understanding is that when you log online to talk about the Internet to express your political opinions, to do what you're doing basically is you're displacing your material and spiritual alienation from the society you find yourself in and sending it out onto the Internet to get resolved.

And everyone has some some percentage of material and spiritual alienation and they are absolutely inverse to each other so like the Chapo fan or alt right NEET is a classic example of somebody who's not really materially, is materially, is genuinely materially deprived in that they can't really expect to own a home or start a family even if they wanted to work or knew people to do it with. But they have home because they live with their parents or something. So they're wildly alienated from the situation mainly in the first sense, even though they have free time, way more free time than somebody who works a lot of hours.

All of their free time is alienated because they are judging themselves and hating themselves for being idle. At some level they believe themselves to be “useless” because they've internalized the notion of work as worth and that uselessness has to get set somewhere. And at some level you identify it as a political problem, if you do, some people, a lot of people don't, most people don't, I mean all those people screaming about Jerry Dunk headphones on Facebook have the same alienation in different degrees and they're expressing at Jerry Dunk for stealing headphones instead of the president because their relative lack of alienated free time makes them less likely to abstract away their concerns into the political realm, they're more likely to for them to be concrete.

So you have people who have this perfect combination of alienations, they go online and they express their opinions and they think, they have some subconscious idea that by doing that they will alleviate their suffering in some way, they don't necessarily think that out loud and in fact they might even tell you to your face and believe it “actually no, I know I'm not doing anything, I'm nihilist” but they're not there's no such thing as a nihilist, the only nihilists are in the graveyard. They have some sort of belief and if they're engaging politically they have a politically belief. Even like “black pill” people who don't say they want politics and thinks that like voting is a “cope” they are still gaining satisfaction from antagonizing a group of people who are who in their mind are political opponents.

And so that's what internet political dialogue to be exact is. The thing is it is inevitable and in fact necessary first step because that's how change happens in a society according to, or that's how change generally happens in the capitalist modernist context is that you get an overflow of alienated free time among like the lower bourgeois in a society. And then that alienated free time gets directed towards the purpose of making the political situation that made them alienated change. The material conditions change which allows them to reach more people who now are, because say they all lost their jobs they're not haven't they don't have as much materially they don't have as much alienated labor time now they have more alienated free time and because in addition to that they have less resources because they're getting paid for fewer hours they are more alienated in general.

And so the time that the leisure alienated middle class they build up answers, they bounce off ideas about what's wrong with the society. So when more people are ready to listen they're there to hand it off to them. That's basically, since the French Revolution that's how social change has moved. Not always in a revolutionary sense sometimes gradually accommodated by the system but, that's the move.

So this is a necessary first step. It was a necessary first step. The internet left was inevitable because that's where the people, they used to stand on street corners and hear guys yell in Hyde Park then the economy got more abstracted and communication and symbols got more abstracted and they listened to guys on the radio, they wrote, they handed out pamphlets and newspapers. Now they're on the Internet and it's all because they are trying to work out for themselves why they don't feel good even though their lives are compared to others even in their own country, city, neighborhood, “okay” materially.

Thing is is that they have nothing productive to do because the economy is only based on profit and I'm sorry we have nothing for you to do you can just hang around even though we've created a structure of incentives and values within this society that means that you basically mean nothing. And now you just have to sit with meaning nothing, well if you sit with meaning nothing long enough in front of a computer you're gonna put that out there. Hyde Park in London, Speakers Corner.

So that's that was inevitably gonna happen and then ideas got refined out of that that's where you had like you know the “Rose Emoji Guy” you know, like, that was a type of person who put political energy into a computer and then it like affected their behavior they started going to meetings at DSA, maybe they knocked doors for Bernie.

And that and that was them trying to act more closely to their actual physical situation because that's what the feedback loop is. You start off with a vague sense of alienation you put it out in the world and try to make sense of it other people talk to you about it. You refine either through conversation or public media or social media which is the latest stage. You refine it into a belief system that convinces you enough to change your behavior. Now you're ready to knock on doors. Now you're ready to do the the Bernie Dialer. Now you're ready to actually, and I guarantee you that everybody who did that felt better about themselves while they were doing it than they did on the computer.

And now Bernie is gone and people don't know where to put the energy especially since most a lot of them are either working 80 hours a week at jobs that could kill them or kill their family members or their buttoned-up with nowhere to talk to and nowhere to put anything but the internet. And so my advice to everybody who's feeling that like, dislocation of okay now I got to find meaning again but the thing is now that thing that gave them their meaning it's all been it's all frozen. Now it's all reified these categories are completely fragile and I mean these these categories are completely they're fragile if they're hitting a certain way but they're completely fixed so there's no more dialogue to do. All you can do is bang your head against the wall make other people feel bad and then feel for a second slightly good about making them feel bad.

But it'll get worse it'll get less and less effective over time and you'll feel more and more misery and you'll have to put more and more of that misery into the Internet and that'll get you less in return. The hedonic treadmill, you're doomed.

But the thing is there is still something for you to do. You fled to the Internet the first time because you didn't know what it was and now you're going back to the Internet. Now you went to the Internet the last time and found it, I know I did, or something closer to it.

Now going back with the same conditions, nothing's really changed, everything's been hardened there is no more growth there. There's only slow decay of your interest in politics. At the end of that hedonic treadmill you are “blackpilled” because it's like I don't get anything else out of this I don't get anything else out of “caring about politics”. And the only way you're gonna fight, but the thing is is that when you hear get off the internet it's terrifying because you still don't know what to do and so what am I gonna do sit here with my thoughts oh my god I'm gonna go insane.

Well that is where the “grill” part comes in I don't mean grill like in the sense necessarily of a Weber or or whatever. I mean look around you, find something that you are good at in some combination of talented at but also willing to keep trying and what that willing to keep trying is is the closer something is to you the easier it is to get you to do it. Like somebody says hand me a pencil you don't even think about it somebody says help me move you have to think about it for a while because physical exertion physical existence in space-time is wearing. It wears on you if you are not centered basically and yet the way you center yourself is do something that you want to do. Like it's easier to move than it is to help someone move because it's your apartment and it's easier to move the pace. And the guys getting paid to move you it's harder for him because he's not doing what he wants to do. You got a move, it's your place so that is less alienated time and it's all about getting closer to your actual conditions.

So you might be terrified that you have nowhere to put all that political energy, that that sense of identity you've got from being a person with politics that were expressed on the Internet. If I can't express them on the internet I don't have these politics well even when you were expressing them on the Internet you really only had those politics to the degree that you acted on them off the Internet. And so what you do is you take that energy and you essentially have to depoliticize it. You have to recognize it as a drive to be, to feel useful to yourself not to society and not to your boss or anything which is like the micro propaganda version of the need to create to yourself first.

And so find something that is enjoyable to do but takes concentration and do it. It could be grilling delicious meats, whatever, it could be I saw a guy today is building, he's rebuilding a fucking a arcade cabinet from the 80s. Whatever it is it needs to be something that you can focus your attention on completely in the here and now and get better at or complete something.

Gaming is the opposite of that. Gaming is just more of the Internet. Gaming is more offloading your need to be directly addressing your needs that are in front of you into a psychic realm where they could only ever fall down the hedonic treadmill like your belief in politics did. Now gaming can't be done in the right frame of mind to be useful to be you know practice. But it cannot be, like, the fact gaming existed is a place for people to put their that alienation is one of the most counter-revolutionary things about American society like in broad structure. Just the fact that there with the internet and with computers and with gaming there's so much place to dump your excess and unexamined alienation that it really undermines your need to address the alienation fundamentally by asking what do I do and so you start by focusing on the here and now.

And if you're still have political views and you still believe in them then they're soaked there’s a reason you believe in them. And now that you were closer to the bone and you're not purely trying to work back because what you're doing by going on the internet to find out what to do next is you're trying to work back from in symbolic levels back to reality from abstraction. There's only so far you can go before you're going to get knocked off course by intervening events. In this case the very structure of dialogue and political communication on the Internet.

It's gonna push you off course you might get there eventually but it's way too inefficient and in the meantime you're just getting older. You're getting more alienated. You're getting more aware of death and it's harder and harder to focus. The only way to do it is if you're working in both directions that is what creates the signal that brings like you can still throw stuff out there on the internet and like think out loud but only if you have a day-to-day in-your-face practice of not even abstract political belief but belief that doing this thing will make me not happy in a distracted way that like masturbation and gaming does but in a genuinely constructive sense that you feel like you are building something.

Now I guess that could be gaming but I would just say most people do not approach gaming that way. I would say that if you get mad gaming you don't approach gaming in a way that would make gaming a construct- basically it has to be a thing you can do that doesn't make you upset or that makes you upset in a way that just read, that could be read channeled into the project. Like I've seen too many videos of guys who get their computer turned off and throw the remote into the screen to think that is a regulated emotional distribution. So but once again like you could if you're true to yourself.

Basically if you aren't lying about what you want gaming can be it and the key there is that if you do something and you don't like it don't stop doing it just stop doing it. Certainly don't try to see like well I'll do something else too and split your attention don't do either of those things say why is this upsetting me why is this irritating me what should I do in this moment to make this project this activity meaningful. And like you might have been struggling with an issue related to like I don't know learning to play the guitar or sculpt and you got frustrated because you weren't willing to push past your confusion and that's because you didn't need to there was somewhere else to get your put your energy into temporarily but it's always gonna grind away the only thing that's sustaining is focused attention on a project in front of you.

Now while you're doing that while you're learning what you care about you're learning what you value and how you much you value it and what activities you're going to most easily be able to maintain that sense of being on the beam of being where you should be of actually doing what you want to do in a deeper way than you could ever tell yourself.

That makes it way easier to figure out what to do to express your politics because you're focused on the here and now right in front of you so all of a sudden maybe like a fucking uh if you really, people say “Electoral politics is done. Fuck Bernie, alright Bernie lost. Electoral politics is done” well no, nothing is done until it's no longer part of the political structure you know. Like elections are there people are gonna put their energy into them. Just because you say they're irrelevant doesn't mean everyone else is going to agree with you.

But don't do electoral stuff if doing things like calling people's houses, knocking on doors, if that is too hard for you to find meaning in don't say “actually electoral is bullshit really” say that isn't what I should be doing to make things better. If you do it like do that stuff if you worked on the Bernie campaign and that stuff gave you a sense of purpose and you found that you enjoyed it, time flew fast it wasn't a scary thing you thought it would be well then find a campaign closer to you, closer to your concerns, closer to your actual literal physical area. All politics is local as old Tip O'Neill said.

But like I said maybe you don't like electoral politics specific and it's like you might have a theoretical reason you don't like electoral politics but you also have to examine yourself. How much of your hatred of electoral politics comes from the fact that you don't want to knock on doors. The fact that you don't want to call strangers and talk to them and if and if and if that's it then you're like well I have to re-examine my my priors.

If that's not it though you still have to reaffirm that by testing theories out in the real world and seeing what brings back to you a sense of purpose. And so while people are, I mean, I'm assuming if you're watching me on Twitch at six o'clock in the afternoon you're probably not an essential worker and if you're not take your time take this idle time and be bored for a minute.

Don't do two things once that's the big one because the real tip to getting off Twitter is actually Twitter is actually very easy to get off of and it's very simple don't do anything else. Don't have Twitter scrolling while you're watching a movie. Don't have Twitter open with a bunch of other tabs. Just scroll Twitter. Guess what will happen. It'll get boring pretty quickly. I mean they're very short little things, there's very little content to them. How many really great tweets do you read in a day even and you'll get bored and the thing is is that maybe in the past you hit that boredom and then you just got mad and decided to troll someone. Put some epic memes out there to get people mad.

Now you're, now you're interested again, now you have jeu sans{sic?} coming back to you from the computer or you turn the TV on or you do something else to leaven the sort of deadening monotony of these little dumbass things coming in. So when that happens try it the next time you're on Twitter just focus on Twitter and when you get bored ask yourself why what is it boring about this and I think you're gonna come to realizations yourself about the limitedness of that platform.

And of course the thing is you these are things that you've told yourself a million times “Twitter is a waste of time”, “Twitter is stupid”, “Twitter doesn't matter” but you're still on it so clearly at a deeper level you believe it does matter because it seems serves a deeper emotional purpose for you it gives you validity. That's that stuff about it not mattering that is psychological cover to allow you to be vulnerable there to be potentially observed in your own state which is of course our nightmare.

So that we say to ourselves “it doesn't matter”, “this is stupid”, “it's actually a stump” so that we can protect ourselves from the thing we need because we're so vulnerable with the need. So if you would like ponder Twitter after sitting with it, sitting with the boredom of it you'll realize oh that stuff I used to have mouth about it being a waste of time that's not just bullshit. That's literally true in the sense that if I keep doing this I'm just gonna keep getting anxious and bored and I'm not going to be able to leaven that anxiety by expressing it elsewhere with different distractions.

So, you put it down instead of just instead of trying to multitask. Now what do you do, well what do you want to do. What do you really want to do and if the answer is something like what you know, you know it's like it can be anything I want to eat a bagel go for it but eventually like keep it keep it like that like well, I want to eat a bagel, I want to read this book, I want to watch a movie, don't go for it just do that, just do that.

But of course eventually the alienation is gonna creep back in you're gonna just the alienation of the fact that you're oaf moron game show host rapist president and his incompetent staff of cronies and buffoons have doomed you to an indefinite detention in personal self-imposed jail. That's pretty fucked up and he's running for re-election against the senile mummy who promises to do all of the same things. But Trump is running on a 9/11s worth of people dying every day until Election Day and Biden's, Amber said this on the show we recorded today it was very funny and Biden's, bid, what do you call it, raise to that bid is how about 9/11 every other day. That's is a horrifying situation, an unconscionable situation and so you want to fix it. What to do? You're gonna want to run to the computer, don't do it, sit with that discomfort, sit with that alienation that this world, this country is barreling towards apocalypse no one has any conception of how to stop it at all.

But people are gonna have to be there to pick up the pieces and what are you gonna do to make that possible. And you're not gonna have an answer is the thing. You are not gonna have an answer and that uncertainty is what used to send you off to the computer. It's what send me off to the computer but if you put if you just say like, if you just basically take that feeling and incorporate it into whatever meaningful task that you have invested attention in you will eventually start to realize the political contours of the world around you and what you can do about them in a positive direction and I can't tell you what that is and you can't tell you what that is now. You're only gonna be able to tell you that yourself that weeks from now maybe if you truly refuse to give in to the lure of the spectacle of online politics, if you choose to grill basically.

Now for people who are off of off there who are listening to this who are actually essential workers I mean I genuinely am thankful for you although I understand that the real motivation is not some sort of a hollow notion of patriotism which is the same scam we pull on the troops. It's so you don't lose your job, it's so you don't lose your house so you can't eat, you know.