Why Everything Everywhere All At Once Hits So Hard

Summary

The video script delves into the transformative power of AI imagine generators like Midjourney, which can turn any concept into visual reality. It explores the impact of the internet and its endless stream of information on our psyche, drawing a parallel to the 'Overview Effect' experienced by astronauts. The script discusses the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' as a metaphor for the internet's chaotic influence on our lives, suggesting that while the digital world is overwhelming, it's possible to find personal meaning and balance amidst the chaos.

Takeaways

• 🤖 The script discusses the capabilities of AI image generators like Midjourney, which can create a wide range of visual outputs based on text prompts.
• 🎨 AI-generated art can be inconsistent, sometimes producing awe-inspiring results and other times yielding bizarre or unappealing images.
• 🌐 The script explores the profound impact of the internet on human imagination, suggesting it remixes collective human creativity with individual ideas.
• 🎬 The film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' is highlighted as a work that captures a feeling of being overwhelmed by the internet's endless content.
• 🌐 The concept of the multiverse in the film serves as a metaphor for the vast array of experiences and perspectives available on the internet.
• 🌐 The 'Digital Overview Effect' is introduced as a psychological shift caused by the sheer volume of information and perspectives encountered online.
• 🌐 The script suggests that the internet can lead to a sense of chaos and the dissolution of traditional values like sincerity and irony.
• 🎥 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' is described as a post-internet film that embraces the internet's chaotic nature and reflects the experience of being online.
• 🌐 The script ponders how to cope with the internet's influence, suggesting that focusing on personal and immediate experiences can provide a healthier engagement with the online world.
• 🌟 The script concludes with a hopeful note, encouraging contemplation and the understanding that there are choices in how we engage with the digital world.

Q & A

What is the main theme of the script?

The script explores the impact of AI image generators, the internet, and digital technology on human creativity, imagination, and perception. It also reflects on the profound psychological effects of constant exposure to diverse and novel information, likening it to the 'Overview Effect' experienced by astronauts.

What is the 'Overview Effect,' and how is it related to the digital world?

The 'Overview Effect' is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts when they see Earth from space, leading them to perceive the planet as a fragile, interconnected whole. The script suggests a parallel in the digital world, where constant exposure to vast amounts of information can cause a similar psychological shift, termed the 'Digital Overview Effect.'

How does the script describe the impact of the internet on modern life?

The script describes the internet as a double-edged sword: a source of endless curiosity, learning, and wonder, but also a potential source of overwhelm, distraction, and disorientation due to the sheer volume of content and perspectives available at any time.

What role does the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' play in the script's discussion?

The film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' is used as an example of a 'post-internet' film that fully embraces the chaotic, maximalist nature of the internet. It reflects the absurd, unpredictable, and overwhelming experience of navigating through infinite digital content.

What is meant by the 'Digital Overview Effect'?

The 'Digital Overview Effect' refers to a psychological shift that occurs from being exposed to an overwhelming amount of information and perspectives online. Unlike the 'Overview Effect,' which involves a change in perception due to physical distance, the digital version is driven by the sheer quantity and diversity of ideas encountered online.

What concerns does the script raise about AI image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E?

The script raises concerns about the implications of AI image generators on creativity, art, and imagination. As these technologies advance, they may change our relationship with visual media, art, and even reality itself, by making anything imaginable a visual reality.

What does the script suggest about the future of digital engagement?

The script suggests that the future of digital engagement will involve more profound challenges as technology continues to advance. It calls for finding healthier ways to engage with the digital world, recognizing what truly matters, and not getting lost in the endless possibilities and distractions that the internet offers.

How does the script relate to the concept of 'post-internet' art and media?

The script relates to 'post-internet' art and media by highlighting how works like 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' do not just comment on the internet but embody its chaotic and absurd nature. This represents a shift from critiquing the internet's content to reflecting on the experience of existing in an internet-saturated world.

What metaphor does the script use to describe the internet experience?

The script uses the metaphor of 'swimming through a world of thoughts, ideas, concepts, and emotions' to describe the overwhelming and unpredictable nature of navigating the internet, where diverse content is presented in a rapid, unending stream.

What does the script say about the generational impact of the internet?

The script suggests that newer generations are growing up with the internet as an omnipresent part of their lives, unlike older generations who experienced it as a separate, log-on environment. This difference is shaping how they view the world and handle information, often without adequate tools or coping mechanisms.

Outlines

00:00

🤖 AI and the Expansion of Imagination

The paragraph introduces the concept of AI-generated imagery through 'Midjourney,' an AI imagine generator that can create anything from a watermelon pie to a cactus ghost based on user prompts. It discusses the varying quality of outputs, from awe-inspiring to terrifying, and the addictive nature of exploring the limitless possibilities AI can offer. The script also touches on the broader implications for art and imagination as AI technology advances, questioning what it means for a world where our imaginations can be made real.

05:01

🌐 The Internet's Impact on Perception

This section delves into the profound effects of the internet on our worldview, drawing a parallel with the 'Overview Effect' experienced by astronauts. It suggests that the internet, with its constant stream of novel ideas and perspectives, can lead to a psychological shift akin to the one astronauts describe. The paragraph reflects on the internet's role in shaping our experiences and how it mirrors the chaotic and maximalist nature of the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once,' which is seen as a post-internet commentary on the absurdity and chaos of online life.

10:07

🌌 Navigating the Digital Void

The final paragraph grapples with the challenge of facing the overwhelming nature of the internet and its influence on society. It acknowledges the difficulty of growing up in a world dominated by the internet and the need for individuals to find a healthier way to engage with it. The paragraph concludes with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, emphasizing the importance of understanding and contemplating the impact of technology on our lives, suggesting that there is hope for a more mindful and balanced interaction with the digital world.

Keywords

💡Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI image generator mentioned in the script, which takes textual prompts and produces visual outputs. It symbolizes the theme of turning imagination into visual reality, as it can create anything from a 'Watermelon Pie' to 'Hunter S Thompson as the president.' The script uses Midjourney to illustrate the power of AI in manifesting the collective human imagination.

💡Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key concept in the script, referring to the technology that powers AI image generators like Midjourney. It is central to the video's exploration of how AI can reshape our creative capabilities and the nature of art. The script discusses the potential impact of AI on art, suggesting that it could democratize creativity by allowing anyone to realize their imaginative prompts.

💡Imagination

Imagination is a core theme in the script, representing the limitless ideas that humans can conceive. It is tied to the script's discussion of AI's role in visualizing these ideas, as AI tools can bring to life anything one can think of, from 'A bathroom designed by MC Escher' to 'A bubble gum farm.' The script suggests that imagination, when combined with AI, can lead to a new era of creativity.

💡Internet

The Internet is depicted as a vast, ever-expanding source of information and ideas, which can have profound effects on individuals' perspectives and mental states. The script likens the Internet to a 'multiverse' of experiences, where one can encounter a plethora of stories and concepts, influencing the 'Digital Overview Effect' discussed in the video.

💡Multiverse

The concept of the multiverse in the script is used metaphorically to represent the vast array of perspectives and experiences available on the Internet. It is mentioned in the context of the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once,' which uses the multiverse as a narrative device to explore the overwhelming nature of modern digital life.

💡Digital Overview Effect

The Digital Overview Effect is a term coined in the script to describe the psychological impact of being exposed to the vast amount of information and perspectives available on the Internet. It draws a parallel to the 'Overview Effect' experienced by astronauts, suggesting that the Internet can lead to a paradigm shift in how we perceive the world.

💡Irony

Irony is mentioned in the script as a concept that has evolved or perhaps lost its meaning in the face of the Internet's chaotic abundance of content. It is used to highlight the absurdity and the loss of sincerity in a world where everything is available at once, and where traditional narrative structures are disrupted.

💡Chaos

Chaos is a recurring theme in the script, particularly in relation to the Internet and the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once.' It represents the disorienting and overwhelming nature of modern digital life, where users are bombarded with an infinite array of content, leading to a sense of disarray and the need for individuals to find personal meaning amidst the chaos.

💡Maximalism

Maximalism is a term used to describe the excessive and chaotic style of the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once,' which mirrors the overwhelming experience of navigating the Internet. The script suggests that maximalism in art can reflect the sensory overload and the rapid shifts in tone and content that are characteristic of online experiences.

💡Sincity

Sin City, while not explicitly mentioned in the script, is implied through the reference to 'A strip mall painted by Monet.' It could symbolize the contrast between the idealized, picturesque views of places (as one might imagine a Monet painting) and the gritty, complex realities that often exist (as depicted in the 'Sin City' graphic novels and films).

💡Personal Engagement

Personal engagement is discussed in the script as a way for individuals to navigate the chaos of the Internet and the digital world. It suggests that by focusing on what truly matters to them personally, individuals can find a healthier way to interact with the vast amount of information and experiences available online.

Highlights

AI imagine generator 'Midjourney' can create visual realities based on prompts.

Results from AI can range from awful to incredible.

Examples of AI-generated images include a 'movie camera by Pablo Picasso' and 'a bathroom designed by MC Escher'.

The unpredictability of AI-generated content is both terrifying and fascinating.

AI technology like DALL-E 2 is becoming more powerful than Midjourney.

The impact of AI on art, images, and imagination is a significant question as technology advances.

The feeling of being overwhelmed by the internet's endless possibilities is described.

Artists like Bo Burnham and the film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' capture this feeling.

The internet is a garden of endless wonder but also a double-edged sword.

The 'Digital Overview Effect' is a psychological shift from consuming vast amounts of information.

The film 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' is a post-internet commentary embracing internet culture.

The internet's impact on the way we see the world is profound and can lead to a paradigm shift.

The film's directors discuss the movie's connection to the internet and the experience of growing up with it.

The internet's influence on current generations is shaping a new way of living.

The film suggests finding a healthier way to engage with the internet's chaos.

Marshall McLuhan's quote offers hope for contemplating and understanding the internet's impact.

Transcripts

Imagine a world where anything you can  think of can become a visual reality.

A Watermelon Pie? We got it. A Cactus ghost?  

Got it. Hunter S Thompson as  the president? We got that too.

For the last several days I’ve been obsessed with  an AI imagine generator called “Midjourney.” You  

put in a prompt like “the perfect cloud” and it  spits out some results. Sometime the results are  

awful, sometimes they’re bizarrely terrifying,  but just as many times they’re incredible.

Here’s a movie camera by Pablo Piccaso.

Infinite Cabbage. / A bathroom designed by  MC Escher. / A person made entirely out of  

cheese. / Deluxe beans. / A strip mall  painted by monet. / Dune directed by Wes  

Anderson. / A bubble gum farm. / “Family Dinner”  by David Lynch / A Symbol for Bliss / Chicken  

Nuggets at a michelin star restaurant. /  Cotton Candy grapes. / Twin Peaks drawn by  

a child. / A potted tongue plant. / Pills by Gucci

I’ve spent hours surfing through what is  essentially humanity’s collective imagination  

remixed by my random ideas and a powerful  Artificial intelligence. It’s addicting  

and fascinating. Every idea is like a gamble,  

you don’t know if it’s going to spit out  something amazing or just a pile of trash.

sorry, a box of trash by Van Gogh

But it’s as terrifying as it is fascinating.  

As this technology improves, (which it already  is; DALL-E 2 Google’s AI image generator is  

much more powerful than Midjourney) What will  it mean for art, images, imagination? What is  

a world where anything we imagine can become a  reality? What if we put everything on a bagel?

That Funny Feeling 

There’s a new feeling I’ve been feeling  occasionally in recent years. It’s hard  

to describe, deeply personal, overwhelming,  fractal, uncomfortable, and yet enticing and  

awe-inspiring. For a while I wasn’t sure what  it was. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from,  

or if anyone else was experiencing  what I was occasionally feeling.  

And then- in 2020, I started noticing some  artists starting to depict the feeling.

The first person who really put  a finger on a part of the feeling  

was Bo Burnham with his Comedy Special Inside:

That funny feeling.

But another recent work- that captures  the feeling in an even more fundamental  

way I think is the incredible, hypermodern,  maximalist film Everything Everywhere All At Once. 

It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical  elements of “multiverses” and how they work  

either as a storytelling device, or as an actual  theory for our own cosmos. But what I’m most  

interested in about the multiverse, as it’s used  in Everything Everywhere all at once, is as a  

metaphor for our own world and our own experience.  And for in a certain sense, the experience of:

Title: “The Internet” 

I love the internet. For someone who’s always  loved learning about new and novel things,  

who has a kind of insatiable curiosity, and could  spend all my time just endlessly exploring and  

learning about what’s out there if I didn’t have  to also do other things like socialize, pay rent,  

and eat: the internet has been a garden of  endless wonder, delight and possibility.  

The internet has an inexhaustible variety  of cool stuff, tons of fascinating people  

and ideas to discover. The internet is why I’m  able to have such a cool and interesting job.

But it’s also a double edged sword. Even when  it’s pointed towards what on the surface feels  

like productive learning, and not just  mindless entertainment, when given the  

option to fulfill endless curiosity, there comes  a tipping point, a crossing of the bell curve.

Here’s the thing: We don’t need an actual  multiverse to put cracks in the clay pot  

of our mind when we already have devices for  careening through the endless imaginations of  

the multitudes, when we exist in an environment  where you can encounter the personal stories and  

experiences from people on every continent,  all who are living their own unique life in  

just a few minutes, all from the comfort  of your own toilet. When more interesting  

ideas and concepts, and people and places can fly  by in the space of one 30 minute Tik Tok binge  

then some of our ancestors experienced in the  entirety of their localized illiterate lives.

The internet, for those who are inspired to spend  lot of time on it and use it in a certain way,  

for those who envelope themselves in it’s  self-referential world of constantly evolving  

novelty and imagery, will inevitably have a  profound effect on the way you see the world.

The Overview Effect What is the result of  

the headlong dive through novel ideas and imagery?

Many Astronauts, upon seeing earth  for the first time from space,  

spinning by below them report something  that has been dubbed “The Overview Effect”

“It is the experience of seeing  first-hand the reality of the Earth  

in space, which is immediately understood to be a  tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void",  

shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.

These astronauts are noting a  difficult-to-describe shift in their psyche  

as a result of their extreme shift in physical  perspective. And while I don’t think the effect  

of being “very online” is same as The Overview  Effect that astronauts experience, I do think  

there’s an analogous effect that can happen from  consuming the amount of information many of us  

now do. Seeing so much of the world so quickly can  trigger a sort of psychological paradigm shift.  

The shift isn’t coming from being exposed to a new  idea of perspective that forces you to reassess  

your own, the shift comes from the shear amount  of perspectives and ideas that we’re exposed to.  

The shift and the feeling of this shift can  contain some positives, but it isn’t all good.

I think for most people the Digital Overview  Effect is a gradual and pervasive accumulation,  

slowly building up as we swim through a world  of thoughts, ideas, concepts and emotions,  

all projected at us through images, text, and  video, one after another in an endless parade.  

Each new idea can pull you in a different  direction, and there’s a certain point where  

everything, the infinite possibility starts to  look and feel like nothingness, at at that point,  

the entire thing collapses on itself. Sincerity  is long gone, but irony has also died.

//

For me Everything Everywhere All at once  is one of the first true post-internet  

films. It’s not just about the internet,  it doesn’t just comment one the internet,  

but fully embraces it in all it’s absurdist,  chaotic glory. The maximalist excess  

and the complete tonal whiplash from one  moment to the next, captures the unhinged,  

unfiltered anarchy of using the internet in a way  that nothing else I’ve ever consumed ever has.  

This is a movie for people who have found  themselves blinking sleep out of their eyes  

with 50 tabs open at 2am, which I suspect  is many more of us than we openly admit.

In an interview with Slashfilm, Daniel  Scheinert, one of the movie’s directors said:

“We've talked a lot about what it's  like to have grown up with the internet,  

and how that exacerbated the typical generational  divide, and what it feels like for everyone,  

no matter old you are, to live right now with the  internet. So, that's one of the key metaphors,  

was just like, we wanted the maximalism of  the movie to connect with what it's like to  

scroll through an infinite amount of stuff,  which is something we're all doing too much.”

Most media that tries to comment on the internet,  comments on the “content” of the internet, or one  

small element that it wants to critique, but it  doesn’t comment on the message that comes from the  

medium of the internet. The way the most absurd  or inane things you’ve ever seen coexist in the  

immediate context of tragedy and your family and  friends. Everything Everywhere All At Once does.  

It’s silly and stupid and choatic  because, well. Welcome to the Internet.

Jobu Tupaki is a child of the internet,  raised in and by the chaos of the multiverse,  

cast unknowingly by her parents, without training  wheels, into the void. She doesn’t have the  

skills to cope, and neither do many of the real  teenagers who are growing up on the internet now.

Evelyn first tries to resist, and then  tries to understand, but realizes that  

she too is not equipped to handle the  onslaught of experiencing the internet head on.

How do we handle this situation?  How do we stare head on into the  

void? Maybe you haven’t experience what I’m  talking about, maybe you don’t know what I mean.  

Maybe you’ve been able to venture into this Brave  New World we’re living in relatively untouched,  

but even if you haven’t I would argue that you  have. Our world is being shaped and formed by  

people who have gone in and haven’t come  out unscathed, while my parents generation  

and even mine got to grow up with the internet as  something that you still went to as box to log on  

to, current generations are growing up with it as  an omnipresent extension of themselves. They grow  

up in a technological world increasing dominated  by the internet, where it’s intertwined with their  

education, social lives, and careers,  and where it increasingly takes a bold  

and defiant individual to take a step  away, much less disconnect entirely.

And it’s not slowing down. While  the adults in power are just now  

becoming aware of the issues that began rearing  their heads in a decade ago, the next decade  

holds even more astonishing wonders and terrors,  waiting for us to embrace them with open arms.

It might sound from all this that I  think it’s a very hopeless situation.  

But I don’t really think that, or at least I  don’t feel hopeless, and neither does Everything  

Everywhere All at Once, which ultimately  affirms a quiet acceptance of a life that openly  

acknowledges the infinite chaos and possibility,  but quietly ignores it and makes the choice to  

value more immediate and personal things.  And in some sense while chaos reigns on a  

planetary scale, it is possible I think for an  individual to find a better, healthier way to  

engage with this Brave New World, and while that  doesn’t fix the problem as a whole, if we can’t  

figure out how to engage with these things  in a healthy way as individuals, we’ll never  

figure out how to do it as communities.

And to engage with this world in a healthier way,  you’ll have to understand what doesn’t matter.  

Because the internet is a place  where everything matters all at once  

all the time. But the real word, the  life you’re living, is one where you can  

only pay attention to a few thing in one  place, at a time. And giving your time and  

attention to a few things that do matter  means looking an almost infinite world of  

possibility constantly vying for you attention  and boldly proclaiming that it doesn’t matter.

There’s a quote from Marshall McLuhan that gives  me hope when thinking about these kinds of issues,  

so I’ll leave you with that:

“There is no inevitability, so long as there is  a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”