An Interview with Sisyphus55
On December 6th, 2023, Zeitgeist sat down with Ben Thomas, or as he’s better known on Philosophy YouTube, @Sisyphus55. With over one million subscribers, Ben’s channel blends existentialist philosophy, leftist politics, modern psychology, and current events in video essays and podcast episodes that are accessible to a wide audience, well-researched, and soothing to watch.
The following is a conversation of three voices. At the time of publication, Amy Kaniper ‘26 is a rising junior at Harvard studying Philosophy and Physics and an editor of the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Olivia Pasquerella ‘26 is also a rising junior studying Social Studies and Philosophy and is now a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy.
Ben traveled all the way from Montreal to Cambridge, Massachusetts to be interviewed by Amy and Olivia (and to see a friend, but that’s secondary, we think). The interview has been abridged for online publication, both within and between responses, but the full video of our more than two hours talking with Ben will be available soon.
CONTENT PRODUCTION AND THE ONLINE LEFT
Olivia Pasquerella
Why do human beings produce?
Ben/Sisyphus55
That's a really interesting question. I really do appreciate Chomsky's kind of—the whole reason why he links linguistics to politics is because of this idea of humans as innately creative. And that's always stuck with me because I just feel like when we have all of our other needs fulfilled—physical needs, psychological needs—we do tend to want to create. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy also, it's a similar concept. And I think, also, when you're a kid, you just innately want to make things. There's something intrinsically fulfilling about just the process of creativity, of production. I think now more than ever, it's an important kind of faculty to harness because I go back to Baudrillard, for example. He makes the argument that Marx's theory was really reliant on talking about production but not talking about consumption as much. And he feels now we are—or I guess, in like the '60s and '70s when he was writing—we have moved to [being] more of consumers than producers. So we kind of lack a certain level of creativity, of being able to generate innate ideas. Nobody's really thinking for themselves as much anymore, and I think cultivating that childlike sense of creativity, productivity—not in the necessarily more capitalist sense, but just, you know, authentic production, authentic creation, artistic expression. That should be harnessed, both for the individual, but I also think there's a social utility to that, too. Why do you guys think we produce?
Olivia Pasquerella
So [in] the class I'm taking, right now we have our Marx week, and I've been thinking a lot about the "species-being" thing… I like that Marx defends production as like, "we'll always be doing this." Because I do like the idea of being able to make things, but also the way that he conceptualizes it—we're species-beings, so we put into whatever we produce reflections of ourselves. And in an almost Sartrean idea of [defining] what we think all of man should be through our actions, we're defining what humanity is… I do also agree with a lot of what Marx says about how the way that we produce is so socially stratified and alienated from the people who do it that I think we're at a point where you have to defend production as being worthwhile as a human endeavor. But I think you're right about the consumption part, too, because, I mean, they should be maybe more theoretically united—between production and consumption–because in society they definitely are. What do you think, Amy?
Amy Kaniper
Something I've been thinking about this last week is my issue with production and producing is I feel we're constantly in some kind of flow of comfort versus action and movement. And comfort, of course, is not the same thing as consumerism because I feel like when I'm consuming, I'm not necessarily comfortable—but comfort in the way of just sitting there and doing nothing. I feel with production, I wonder, what's the balance of it? I feel like we're all constantly producing as students, as creatives, as thinkers, as humans. And is there a line where we could produce too much, you know? Because I feel there's definitely a line for me where there's some kind of guilt or even just innate discomfort with being comfortable for too long.
Ben/Sisyphus55
No, that makes sense. I mean, I was talking to this PhD student who is researching the Online Left and streaming in particular, like Hasan [Piker], Vaush, those personalities. And his argument is that what they're producing is substantial for political change. For example, it's leading to some level of discomfort. And he brought up the idea of flow as a reason for that and the idea of flow psychology. Flow psychology is based upon that process or that state of being we have when we're engaged in a sort of production or activity [in which] the challenge of whatever we're doing is slightly above our own skill level. So it creates this kind of sense of altered time and this feeling of, usually, enjoyment. His argument was streaming does that for the audience, but I kind of disagree because I felt, like in what you're [Amy] talking about, it's actually creating a lot of… comfort, and it's maybe placating the need for real political engagement or real political action. And when I say that, then some people will say, "Well, no, that is real political action." He and I have been having an ongoing conversation about this, but I feel like flow, at least in this conversation, was a useful way to measure the extent to which production might be useful or causing the perfect level of discomfort, or maybe consumption [is/does] also…
Olivia Pasquerella
Do you experience flow from a content-producer side as well?
Ben/Sisyphus55
Yeah, I think that it's made me really hyper-aware because now I have lots of time to analyze what I'm doing, and it's like, "why am I doing it?" And there's definitely been times where there's been sponsor deadlines, or I don't necessarily want to make a video and I feel the alienation, and I'm kind of detached from the production process and I don't feel that flow. But I think more and more over the past year, I felt more and more attached to the work and I feel a bit more challenged because I'm actively going out of my way to research things that require a little bit of extra attention, extra research, going out and interviewing other people also. So it's really just trying not to stagnate and always trying to improve on your own terms, and not necessarily on what the social or economic conditions want you to improve on, which is hard and a very privileged position to be in, especially as a content creator.
Amy Kaniper
It's interesting how there are forms of production where you can convince yourself that you're not really adding anything to the consumer side. Like when you write a silly essay for class, maybe, and it feels like, okay, I am producing thought. I am producing some kind of change in, maybe, my own ideas about things and finalizing something, but it's not really going to be consumed as content. But with YouTube videos and social presence and such—how do you feel about that, the fact that everything you produce is consumed?
Ben/Sisyphus55
It's this weird feeling where I'll really research a video and I care about it a lot, and then once it's out there, I just don't care about that topic quite as much usually. I think it has something to do with the fact that there's other people's opinions attached to it, there's just this larger system of validation. And then also, you can think an idea's really important, but if it gets a 10 out of 10 on the YouTube Analytics thing—so it's one of the lower-viewing videos in your last ten—you'll also just start thinking less of those ideas, I guess. I can see really easily how the format of the medium can encourage people to kind of fall in line and research things that are maybe less radical, less revolutionary, or just less strange or fun to do. It's maybe not even for money necessarily, but it's just that social capital or validation is really prized. I don't think it's a deliberate thing that anyone chooses. It's just the algorithm. And I'm pretty sure years from now, we'll have more and more research on algorithms and how they affect society and politics and knowledge. I know there's already some papers on it, but I find that that field is very small so far.
Olivia Pasquerella
Yeah, I think, on that note, we know the Internet silences a lot of content coming from, like, anything that critiques capitalism or critiques systems of oppression. And so, do you ever have cause to wonder as to why not just you but other people are able to produce videos that so explicitly critique capitalism but also get a ton of views?
Ben/Sisyphus55
Yeah, that's been an area of interest for me because there are some creators that are very outspoken in their dislike for capitalism, and they are sometimes the most rewarded in these spaces through capital. Their message is being spread through a platform that's owned by Amazon, for example, like Twitch. Cynically, I think of that as some form of capitalist realism, where it's just very subtly incorporating the very critiques of it into its system so that the people that are involved in it, whether how much they dislike capitalism, at the end of the day, they're profiting off of it in a material sense. So they can talk about these issues and they can send that message of "This is such a substantially terrible system," but they are also not quite willing to go the extra mile in terms of constructive action that could then limit their own position in society, or at least that remains to be seen. It's not their fault, it's nobody's fault. But it's just kind of naturally how this works out, I think. That's why I'm a little bit cynical, and I'm kind of thinking maybe, especially like anti-capitalist sentiment online, a lot of it might be placating the ways in which people could actively get engaged and make things a little bit more equitable and stuff like that.
Olivia Pasquerella
Yeah, I mean, to be [begrudgingly] fair to the "BreadTube" people, it's not an Internet-only problem, and it really never has been. The "armchair Marxist" is a real-life trope, too, especially at a university level… I can imagine all these like Marxist scholars in a room together debating about what Marx thought at the end of his life, and they understand his critiques so well. I think they know that there was something normative there, but they're just gonna bog themselves down in this intellectual debate that will never leave the room and also doesn't consider any of the ways that revolutions in the Global South or the Black Panthers in the U.S., for example, have taken Marxism and done actual praxis. I think even at the university level it's disturbing to think about the number of [scholars of Marx or anti-capitalism] who have lives that don't just not challenge capitalism but actively support it.
Ben/Sisyphus55
That's why I've been interested in Sartre's writings when he's trying to incorporate Marxism and existentialism and he talks about surreality. He's talking about praxes, and praxes is, basically, we all have a shared social environment, and all the actions we commit in there are our praxes. We're all trying to go for certain goals, or we have certain motivations. The environment affects our praxes, and our praxes affect the environment, and other people's praxes affect—it's all a very, very hard system to try to break down and predict exactly what's going to happen. But he notes especially when he saw some movements in the '60s, like leftist movements—and I think we see this in academia now and especially online because now it's so profitable to do so— the classic leftist infighting. And not to the point where—I actually think leftist infighting is perfect, I think that it’s fine—but to the point where it’s like we're lowering the chances for any actionable steps. It's just staying in the classroom or staying on the livestreams. And Sartre, when he's talking about these leftist movements, sees that as an issue of scarcity. So back then, it was social scarcity, kind of prestige or reputation, and also capital scarcity, because these different groups are kind of fighting for money, ironically. When you have scarcity, you have this concept of surreality, where you just have a bunch of actors in these social spaces with praxes that are not necessarily all in line and they're all going against each other or after each other. Because there's this idea of, there's not enough for everybody. An example is a riot, where it can look like, under this surreality, everybody's moving together. They're all moving together for the same reason, but there isn't some unified goal necessarily. Or people lined up at a market or something, they're all going for the same thing, it looks like there's some unity, but it's still surreality, they're all individuals. So he introduced the concept of group praxis, which is, basically, you can still have all of this disagreement, and you don't have to be friends or unify your movement at all. But, can you develop some sort of symbol or some sort of actionable goal that everyone can agree on or at least concede to, where the praxes can momentarily be united? So I was interested with live streamers, for example, the whole “progressive victory” when it was like Vaush, Destiny, and Keffals, I think they've all had issues in the past, but then they went and did a canvassing event together. I believe that would be considered some form of group praxis—or even just like fundraising events and stuff like that—where it finally leaves the discourse, which is so profitable and, I think, still necessary, but it goes beyond it and actually does something. But I don't know how likely that is with online spaces because it is really profitable to have this level of division.
WHO AND WHAT IS PHILOSOPHICAL?
Ben/Sisyphus55
I think ideally philosophy is introduced at an early enough age where it destabilizes the motivations to just live your life pursuing capital. That's why I got into philosophy, I remember, I went on a trip to Europe and I was like, "Whoa, everybody here's so unhappy, but in such a cool way, where they have, like, opinions and stuff!"
Olivia Pasquerella
And like cigarettes...
Ben/Sisyphus55
Exactly. Everybody was very well-educated and everybody was really philosophical, and it blew my mind that, for mandatory courses, they have to take philosophy from a really young age. And I grew up in Alberta, which is a very conservative practical, pragmatic province in Canada that's heavily reliant on fossil fuels. So our education system is primarily built on pushing people into engineering and business, into the petroleum industry in some way… It's all very profit-driven because your family made a lot of money, and they want you to make a lot of money. So that's like unquestionable, so then if you're taking a week-long ethics course, it's not really going to destabilize any of those values. Whereas if at a young age you—I don't think there's anything wrong with this, for an education system to make your kids a little bit more skeptical and lose a little bit of innocence in terms of what society has been feeding them. I think it'll create a healthier society, maybe a bit more cynical, but I think that is something the French have over others. That’s the other thing with specialization nowadays—everybody wants to, or at least the education system is made to, specialize you into a specific thing. And the problem is that it's really reducing our ability to communicate between each other and understand what's going on. There's that kind of feeling of a cog in the machine. So it would be good to have—you're [Amy] taking a physics degree and a philosophy degree, something like that. For me, that's rare, to hear somebody that's kind of engaging in two seemingly very disparate fields that, I don't think, always communicate, but I think they probably should more often.
Amy Kaniper
The history of the communication between physics and philosophy is really interesting… In this one class I took on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, a big takeaway that we had in the course is the fact that trying in any way to encourage some kind of philosophical interpretation of physics is sometimes frowned upon in the physics community. It all became important when quantum mechanics came to the forefront, and then there were people like, hey, this is working really great for science, it has applications that do good things. But then people are kinda like, wait, but what is it doing? There became this big fight, in the academia sense—“that paper's stupid,” or things like that. There was really a question of the usefulness of having a philosophical interpretation of physics.
Ben/Sisyphus55
I guess we've already talked about alienation a little bit, but there's also [Hartmut] Rosa, who is this philosopher who's come up with, “what would be a ‘not alienated’ person”? And he brings up the whole idea of time and how we really live in a society that's based on things going really, really quickly, as much as possible. And he says that this is regardless of class, so if you are at the highest rungs of society, you have an internalized sense of not wasting time, in a sense of productivity and you need to be doing more and more, being better. Even if you have a lot of money, well, you have to be spiritually actualized, you have to look really good, you have to be going to the gym a lot, you have to be experiencing as much as possible, like FOMO. If you're in the middle rung or the lower rungs and you have a job, it's externally imposed, so you're feeling like you never have enough time. Your boss is constantly telling you to do things, you have to go to the factory. And then if you're on the outside of this, you are basically cast as this not very good person or somebody not useful to society, and your entire job now is to clamor for these time pressures because you're unemployed, you don't have any pressure, but it feels morally wrong to not have that. And Rosa’s whole thing is, this is what's causing a lot of alienation because we're not able to just linger and enjoy each other's company and enjoy leisure as much or philosophize, to ask, “Why are we doing these things?” That's why he uses the theory of resonance as a counteract to alienation, where you're able to take time with certain experiences, theories, or other people that are incorporating you as a full agent, and you're incorporating them. There's a challenge and potentially some sort of transformation. And it's potentially destabilizing, which is bad for a society because society needs to have things run on time because there's time pressure. I thought it was very insightful, this idea that it is just time pressure at the end of the day that's causing so many of these things—this sense of efficiency, even at the sacrifice of knowing what we're being efficient for.
Amy Kaniper
These conversations that can happen about optimization or actualization are so useful. They can be so transformative to someone's thoughts, productivity, and path to happiness that it's very sad that economic issues and other barriers in society make it hard to get engaged in those conversations if you're not already engaged in them.
Ben/Sisyphus55
This is another issue with academia especially, [that] they don't even consider this large population where they don't even have enough time to consider these things. It is a point of privilege to be able to sit down and meander about what you want to do with your life. It definitely causes a certain level of existential dread, but the fact that you can do that is special. So you don't want to misuse it also, and unfortunately, a lot of people still misuse it with that agency. Because there's just a lot of people that are literally surviving for the most part—and I think that's going up more and more as the years go by—, it is the job of people with access to these resources to figure these things out and then apply them. I think it's mostly that people are just figuring things out because applying them would mean to destabilize things, and that would mean that those people in comfortable positions would be in less comfortable positions. And that's not talking about the 1 percent, that's talking about most of the population in the U.S. and Canada, for example, compared to the rest of the world. Most people can live without thinking about surviving right now, which is already a special thing. If you're able to do that, definitely take with it some level of responsibility, I guess.
Olivia Pasquerella
Yeah, I think also there's value to the idea that anything can be philosophical, and so it's not that even if you are in that standpoint of always thinking about immediate necessities and ways to survive—I don't think it's that those people can't also philosophize and live lives that are deeply philosophical. It's just that it takes on a different tone and timbre kind of.
Ben/Sisyphus55
I think honestly philosophy is really just when you were a kid and you would just annoyingly always ask "Why?" about things, it's just retaining that in some way. It's always accessible to people, but the tolerance of the people around you to continually ask "Why?" when the environment around you and your immediate needs aren't being met—that can cause some conflict. But yeah, obviously, philosophy is not something that should be gatekept nor do I think it is gatekept. But for the people that are basically able to make an entire living off of philosophy or even just intellectualizing or anything—if you can make your living online, for example—I do think that myself and other people should take with that a certain level of responsibility.
PALESTINE, POLITICAL COMMUNICATION, AND THE USE OF FORCE
Ben/Sisyphus55
Marshall Rosenberg was originally using this as a process for racial disparities and inner-city conflict with these kids, but nonviolent communication is a four-step process where, first of all, you ask the other party, what do they observe about the conflict or whatever's going on, maybe about even what do you observe about me specifically? And then from that, it's assumed that you're going to have certain feelings about these observations. You look at, for example, how people have talked about the Israel-Palestine conflict—observations are usually coupled with evaluations immediately, so instead of talking about, “From what I see, this area was bombed,” people say, "This was a genocidal act." And that might be true, but the problem is you are already lacing it with something that is going to make it harder to communicate later down the road, which that's fine, if that's not your choice, but I think that you then don't really get the right to complain about the lack of communication going on or lack of cooperation. So you need to have non-evaluative observation to begin with and, then, your feelings towards it. And then it's assumed under this theory that your feelings are the result of either a need being satisfied or a need being thwarted in some way. It's assumed that we all have certain basic needs, so it does come from a humanistic standpoint, but these needs are pretty broad. If you feel the need to be respected or understood or loved or the need to feel some sort of agency or competence, that is then communicated… It [Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication] is a specific process that has been used in political disagreements, it's been used between gangs, it's used pretty widely. I don't see it used at all when it comes to stuff online, especially. But I think that that would be a really concrete way to, at least, make the conversation a little bit more constructive.
Olivia Pasquerella
With the example you gave, I feel with all the content that I see, like when Israel is carpet-bombing Palestine, it does makes sense to me that people outright call it "genocide," even if it does kind of reveal an underlying assumption. Especially online, I think it can have a very helpful effect of combatting a lot of the propaganda people are otherwise consuming, like Noam Chomsky talks about in Manufacturing Consent, that's still very deeply embedded in everything the media has done [in regard to Palestine]. I guess maybe in the past month, CNN or something has reversed course a little bit and started criticizing Israel finally, but at the end of the day, I think that terms like “genocide” that are very crystallizing for people morally—those liberal media sources will still hold back on [using] them. And so I do wonder, even if it is maybe not communicated as thoroughly as we would like, if sometimes it is just helpful to see a video that says, "This is what happened. This is genocide." And I wonder what you feel. Do you think that that ultimately is not helpful for political discourse because it doesn't help people understand why it is genocide?
Ben/Sisyphus55
I would generally agree that it's genocidal what's going on, but for that example, I would assume you are talking to a hard-line Israeli who is fully for Israel. So by calling it “genocide” immediately, it's evaluative and you're accusing them of something, even if it is potentially correct. You could be talking to an IDF member. It's potentially correct, but the problem is, what are your intentions in this conversation? Is it to win them over? Are you trying to understand what they see? Then, you would really try to hold back, and you would be like, "This is what I see." Then, you can say, "I feel like this is genocidal," because genocide, in itself, the definition is—once you bring that up, from a point of observation, you are entering into a conversation that risks creating non sequiturs because then that person can totally avoid the fact that lots of people are dying, and they can start just criticizing your use of the term. So that right there opens up, I would say, non-constructive dialogue and gives them the opportunity to keep the conversation away from what is actually happening, which is that a lot of innocent people are dying. The other thing is that it's hard to talk about this beyond hypotheticals because it would just be about who you're talking to and what's going on specifically. In an idealized sense, this process is really trying to completely take out any sort of evaluative elements at the initial point. Also because you could make the observation, and you could very concretely use all of the definitions of what genocide is in your observation, and that could be used as a point of conversation, of why you think that it's genocidal. But at that step, in the very beginning, it's generally not seen as constructive for further dialogue. So it isn't to say this is a process to be used at all times. It's to be used if you're trying to understand the other side and also get your point across. It also involves a lot of understanding from each party, which I think is one of its downsides.
Ben/Sisyphus55
Ever since the Israel-Palestine conflict, I've been interested in Frantz Fanon versus Camus when they were both talking about the Algerian movement because I find points of agreement with both of them. I think I probably side with Camus's whole idea that he's not advocating for the end to violence or the end to murder because he just doesn't even think that's a worthy ethical stance to make because it's just not possible. But he says, as an individual, it is your utmost right to limit the death of innocents as much as possible, which is already kind of a precarious stance because, who's innocent, who's not, who's complicit? But once you do entertain the possibility for killing others, that should be taken with a great level of weight to it. And then at the same time, there was an interview with Angela Davis where she was criticizing the reporter for asking, like what do you think about violence and revolution, and she says that's almost like a blatant disregard for the amount of institutional violence that Black people have suffered for a great amount of time. Because a lot of times, that question kind of is making it sound like violence is this sudden choice that somebody's making and not a reaction to this slower, long-term, institutionalized violence that's been happening to a specific group. And also, just the fact that anytime there's going to be any sort of revolutionary change, it's going to naturally appear violent because it is going to break away from the norm or the way that the institutions are. So my stance is it [the use of violence] is probably necessary at times, but it does need to be treated with a lot more respect and almost some sort of sacred element to it than I think it is being treated with currently on Twitter and social media.