[Video description: footage of Bo Burnham speaking at some kind of panel. Initially the camera is zoomed close on his face and torso. The camera view occasionally pans out showing that he is sitting on a stool, between two pale-skinned individuals. They are backlit by a giant screen showing pale lavender with text and logos on it. As he speaks he occasionally makes emphatic gestures with his hands. As he finishes talking, he throws back his head and makes a gesture of dismissal or āI donāt know.ā Transcript below of his speech.]
Bo Burnham: These content creators are wrestling with these difficult questions of the sort of weird, meta⦠like, hellscape that it is to be online. Itās weird. Itās weird and itās complicated. And the kids know it and they sense it.
Theyāre coming for every second of your life. Thatās what these companies are coming to. This company, as well. And itās not because anyone is bad. Itās not because anyone in this company has evil plans, or is trying to do this. Theyāre not even doing it consciously. Itās because these companies like Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram and everything they went public and they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant.
Youtube, Twitter grossed $4-5 billion last year, it is in the red. It is unprofitable. It has to get more of you. No matter how nice itās trying to be, it is all ā Theyāre trying to get more engagement from you. We -- we used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into. And thatās where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. There was no other place for the businesses and capitalism to expand into.
And then they realized, human attention. That we can now ā they are now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone, and they could be gathering information to target ads at you. That thatās whatās happening.
So like, as much as we can, you know, have really good conversations the, like, mechanism of the business is rolling towards that just because of the market. So, like. Itās coming. Itās coming for every free second you have. And thatās dark. Thatās really, really dark and scary.
And for someone like me, I grew up a little on the internet, and I felt the repercussions of it, I suffer from anxiety. So, I know where it leads. And Iām saying like, you donāt want this. Trust me, like, youāre not going to feel good about yourself.
And you know it. The kids know it.
Like, the whole joke on the internet is everyoneās like, āThis place sucks right?ā I mean like, thatās like⦠kind of the thing. Thatās why their memes are all ironic and detached, and self-referential and 12-layers deep.
āCause truth is completely dead to them and they know it. They look at the president, they look at the culture, they go, āWhat the hell is this?ā They look at like, Coca-Cola commercials that are winking at them and smiling. And they go like, āForget it.ā
So like, ugh, I have no idea [audio cuts out, captions remain that show the end of the sentence] whatās going to happen.























