Philosophy Tube

The building I was born in used to be a hospital - now it's luxury flats. Let's talk about how cities are developing, and the challenges to building better ones. We'll discuss gentrification, and then we'll pivot to talking about 15-minute conspiracy theories and the obstacles we face to thinking smarter about urban design.

I read as much of Judith Butler's work as I could. They're often misunderstood, the subject of HUGE backlash, and perhaps best known for their theory of gender performativity. On this episode we learn about what they said and why so many people get them wrong.

Death is certain: we don't like thinking about it but it's true! But on Philosophy Tube we think about everything, so this episode confronts death head-on. We talk about why individuals find it so difficult to think about and plan for the end, what happens to YouTubers' channels when we die, and from there we shift gears. This is a video about Gaza, and COVID, and climate change, because our refusal to think about death enables us to keep ignoring it on a mass scale, even when our societies are implicated in it. From there we go into some broader artistic reflections about the difficulty of making art (or indeed content) about dying.

Social media impacts democracy in huge ways beyond the obvious "fake news" and "free speech" issues. It restructures the economy around "surveillance capitalism" and changes the way we communicate. Democracy and elections need information to function, so what's the fallout from altering the public information space with digital technology?