Media Philosophy: A Critical Wrap-Up 

Hi mates! If we seek role mates in sincerity, and soul mates in authenticity, what kind of mates do we seek here in profilicity?

This series, just like the thinkers/ideas that were covered, has been seminal for contemporary philosophy or even those with a passing interest. Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues have done behind the scenes!

People didn't "just buy shoes". In rural areas they made their own shoes, in urban areas they chose "the shoemaker" - aka the proto-brand. In other words, this second-order observation was a vital technique in urban artisans and merchants, or the Bourgeoisie, even before the so-called "authenticity era". If you think about it, most people living in small-sized, tight-knit social groups adapt this second-order observation in their lives, they act as if their neighbor and elder is watching them. My point is, maybe "identity before the authenticity era" was not about sincerity, but a "proto-profilicity", only "the Other" was present, a collection of people one knew and could name each member.

Professor, the quotation you began your video with reminds me of a quotation from a novel by Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite fantasy/scifi authors: “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life-they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”

I think this is your best video explaining profilicity. I will share this video so that other people will know that I think this is your best video.

This completely refreshed my drive into continuing media studies. Thank you.

absolutely eye-opening. keep it up.

This concept of offline proficility is interesting; looking forward for the next video. Personally, I always differentiated what I put online about me (what I'd call my "image", or my "profile"), and who I am in first order observation. For example, I will say on my CV or my personal webpage that I'm good in this and that to find some work, but I won't speak about other of my skills because I don't want to use them for work. In that sense, I know there is a discrepancy between my first-order and second-order identity. Also, I don't think my first order identity is very well defined; I guess there is some core in there, but it's shifting and changing often. In contrary, I can build my profile to be consistent overtime, because to me it's only a tool I can use to help and get what I want (and it's not necessarily negative, to get the job I know I would enjoy and where I would be the most effective for example. It doesn't necessarily imply lying either, at the end the profile is just another part of my identity, and I wouldn't be surprised that, indeed, it shapes my first order identity too). I think what helped me the most in all your videos is this simple fact: our identity doesn't matter that much. Or at least we shouldn't take it too seriously. That's a very important point, and I think that it might be a key to feel better. Maybe to finally stop thinking about ourselves all the time. Don't know, my profile is thinking out loud.

Excellent wrapping up

Wow, great stuff. Can't say I fully understand it yet but I connected with enough of it to make me want to understand it more deeply. Please understand that your work is highly valued and please keep it up. Regards

This video is brilliant!

“Copies without originals” reminds me of Rene Girard

I think there is something distinguishably different about modern media that makes an exegesis that begins with the mass reading of books somewhat unrelatable. I salute your "originality" insofar as you have here developed a comprehensive philosophical media theory in the continental school tradition of idealism, something that's both refreshing and old at the same time. Given that most modern philosophers haven't produced anything worth reading in decades, I think this is a testament to the corruption of the academic pursuits in the west, that you would have to work out of China to have the space necessary to advance your ideas, all of which, as far as I can tell, you are spot on. Both your notions of prophilicity, and your exegesis of wokeism as a symptom of neoliberal individualism and German guilt-pride are very correct in my view, and finally provide the kind of explanation that is consistent and makes sense. I find your views with respect to profilicity as it functions within a status system rather more convincing, however, than how it connects to the broader media theory presented here. The interplay between media as an observer and relayer of information, and the instrument that shapes, inversely, the behavior of the subject is very interesting and I think accurate. If we observe the present state of the Instagram generations, it becomes fairly obvious that the camera is not just the method of relaying life experience, the camera instructs almost in a scripted way the generation of the life experience. Prior to it, and without it, the life experience would have unfolded through the authentic desire of the subject, but is now instructed in a scripted fashion by the perceived audience, the subject desire to obtain feedback from the audience, and the particular fancy of the broader context that in all directions influences the generation of the stage play. This inauthentic life experience poses as authentic life experience making the pursuit of aspirational screenshot scripted life the actual pursuit rather than the capture of authentic moments.. A stage play generated by the instinctive speculation. Which is almost certainly always a comedy both in the content and in the method. The subject is no longer observed, he is both observing and scripting his own life play aspiring to the kind of achievements and experiences that would play best recorded, making the audience as much a part in determining the script as he can anticipate would receive the broadest indulgence. Though rather modern, this still fits nicely into the biological evolutionary theory with respect to status hierarchies, where humans form three primary hierarchies: dominance, merit and virtue. The media play of seeking followers (for profit in many cases) fits somewhere along all three, or perhaps requires a fourth "influencer" hierarchy since it's difficult to exactly pinpoint whether the audience likes the performer or despises the performer. He has therefore a complicated relationship with his audience, which is both crafting and observing the script of his life, while he attempts to dominate them both in fame and wealth, outdo them in the same pursuit or similar in the merit category, and as far as virtue goes, well, as long as one is woke that seems to be sufficient to at least not break the performative art. His relationship with his audience is both hostile and mutual, and it's tough to say who the parasite is. Both the audience and the performer recognize that what's unfolding is an elaborate stage play with cameras and lights. But yet they still are not able to separate how it compels them and how it shapes their view of themselves. In that way, it is the ultimate of the idealistic systems, a subject and a mass of people caught within their own non-objective commodity structure, the reification plainly apparent in every screenshot, and yet unable to separate themselves from Plato's cave transfixed and addicted to the shadows before them. It is, in a perverse way, an addiction to the ideal form. The ideal form of that sublime object of desire nobody quite knows - the aspirational nothing that feels like something attainable, if just for a moment, through the profilitic form of someone else, which neither the subject is, nor what the audience could be, but desperately desires. Lacan lives in the form of the ideal, the sublime object of desire. The media, the tools as you call, might therefore be new, but what is human remains the same. Kudos to you for a nod both to the new and to your broader philosophical tradition of Hegel, and Plato, and Žižek.

Is that the ‘Blame!’ manga on the shelf? Nice. Probably in my top 10.

Very efficient and thorough. Very GERMAN.

Woah i was just watching an old Kant video of yours wondering when you were going to upload again

love the thumbnail picture:)

Time for another lecture

Great one boss. What you think of Bruno Latour ?! Feels quite same ish to some regards

Please can you do a profilicity-based critical analysis of The Truman Show movie?

How did you do the cover for this video? It's awesome.

live the series! thank you. Any thought given to the Heideggerian distinction between "Hervor-bringen" und "Heraus-fordern" as two modes of revealing? so authenticity seen as a form of action rather than an identity?

I feel like we live in an age of increasing conformity. I think a video on surveillance capitalism would be really relevant.

I feel like from what I've read- but would hesitate to claim that I firmly understand- of one of Lacan's seminars (maybe the tenth one, on anxiety) that his discussions around the gaze and the mirror, and the Big Other, are perhaps psychoanalytic reworkings or maybe even earlier expositions of the idea of profilicity- of the idea of seeing others or you yourself being aware that you are being seen as being-seen. I dunno, I could be way off, the edibles are running strong.

love the BLAME! tome as a pun

Hello professor, are you going to make a video about Simondon?

i love you, dog

Would it be possible for you to eventually cover Michel Clouscard, and specifically his "Neo-fascism and ideology of desire" (1973) ? More to the point how it can describe retroactively the society we find ourselves into today. I have a hunch, if the audience is anything like the French one for Clouscard, that his thoughts on the matter will find echo in many. I'd say it could be an extension of your media series, in a way. In any case, it'd be very interesting to hear your thoughts on Clouscard.

One thing I find interesting about profilicity is its inherent multiplicity. Multiple profiles serve different purposes, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tinder etc. In authenticity, this is explicitly inauthentic. I can remember my aunt once having a go at my dad for being "two-faced" because he'd been polite to a person but later talked negatively about them. To me, though, his behaviour was perfectly reasonable. There was no reason to be rude to that person when he met them and venting to family/friends is a great way to release the tension of having to be polite. My dad was being profilic while my aunt was judging him based on her idea of authenticity. Multiplicity isn't all good or bad of course. Politicians are famously multiplicitous, presenting as favourable a face to anyone that can support them. Voters or funders want to see very different things from a politician.

Please consider doing an analysis of television show The Curse it seems to be circling many of the same issues you are in your work.

In regards to the last section, in what way does this new "internalized general peer" differ from the older idea of the "super-ego"? Similar in that it's an internalized external critical voice, but different in the type of 'seeing' and 'criticism' that happens? The agent being a general peer as opposed to authority figures or role-mates? I'm not saying necessarily that they are the same, or different for that matter, but I'm interested in what other people think about the comparison.

This video makes me think that the dualism of "mind vs body" of the past has been replaced with "society/technology vs people". They way people talk about culture, media, technology and government is as if they are wholly separate from people, as if these systems are interchangeable and the people who inhabit them will remain the same, only with "better" or "worse" conditions. You see it with reactionaries who think we can just return to old systems of religion and that they will work as they always have; and you see it in revolutionaries who think, "oh, just impose this new system and the people will flourish" instead of realizing that once the system is imposed, the people you intended to "help" will now be different and in a different world.

The commodification of the self; copies without originals

In comparison to authenticity being validated by present peer soulmates, How is validation negotiated with the general peer? Does that only occur online?

I'm wondering if profilicity is a mandatory way of creating your identity today? If we decided that we wouldn't want to create profiles, would other people consider us as having no identity at all? If not now, because we can still rely on older identity-making technology, then will that old technology eventually be considered obsolete, and we would virtually have to create profiles, just to be able to communicate our identity to enough people to meet our needs? Should I be trying to create a profile?

we create our ideals, and our ideals create us.

How does the general peer differ from the big other? What you describe is basically what I understood the big other to be.

I wonder when I buy some new item on Amazon or EBay I go over the reviews of product from other people, how does this affect profilicity of this product?

14:39 There is no universe where Starkultus isn't the name of a Star Wars sith master...

So is this a bad thing for human emancipation? And if so how can we escape/move past this?

I would argue that WE don't shape media for curating profilicity because our material relationship to media is as a consumable. Media in most of its forms is a one sided operation feeding off of our needs to exploit weaknesses. Ownership of media production means to have material control over it. Celebrities are no realer than cartoons, but they serve a purpose. The prestige of classic novels and poetry also serve some underlying goal, The abstraction and intellectual weight of a philosophical discussion, Manly ruggedness of team sports, the sleekness and abstraction of programmers. Second observation is not our design. There is a natural second observation called ignorance. And then there is designed exclusivity and bias of traits and interests. Media becomes our vision past the horizon. It intends to replace our image of the world. It is a function of power, its just a filter. What media is right now is a real attempt to replace "scientific" observation and discussion with an idealized reality into our minds.

I wonder if the concept of an ever present god that watches and judges our every move (like in christianity or Islam) already lead to some kind of profilicity…? In a way if you believe in a ever watching/ever judging being you see the whole world your whole life from a second order observation. Or am I misunderstanding the concept of profilicity/ second order observation?

How is the notion of "profilicity" not merely a defeatist rebranding of Heidegger's Das Man?

Does anyone think that the conclusion draws a full circle in which we're back to a new form of earnestness, albeit an earnestness that is far more all encompassing i.e., no matter your traditional "role" in culture, now you obey the injunction to "profile," at a higher order? Earnest profilicity?

please start selling those t shirts

Hi! Do you have an email for business inquries, by chance?

What does having this much self-awareness between media and the viewer affect the viewer moving forward?

Anyone else here a fan of Blame!?

I would love to see a conversation between you and professor Sam Vaknin. He's an expert on narcissism and psychology and talks frequentlyc about how social media has affected our minds and personalities. Hint: we've all become more narcissistic and or codependent. I think you'd have fun talking with him and i think your audience would gain a lot from it. Just don't do it to build your profile 😉

The media it was hoped. could be a tool of authenticity. yet how the majority of large movies are made in Hollywood by people who live in Hollywood and who have morals and views shaped by Hollywood leading to many Hollywood movies feeling the same.

11:37 Sign doesn't signify, it points out

777

weed

Nothing is authentic in the sense of trueness. Authenticity is a broadly misunderstod term, which is more correctly defined as "seemingly true".

Cool narrative. I don't believe it.

Tremendous Summary! The Age of Second Order Mimetic Imbecility!