Bo Burnham refers to the labor chances from in-person to working online from home and how the use of technology affected society.  His main platform for work was making comedy and songs online.  In 2020, 7.3% of the US labor force had reported doing their primary job and all of their work from home.  This is around 11 million people [1]. 

  Bo Burnham also talks ironically about how being a white male, he will use the online platform to "appear to save the day..." and spread comedy to help the systematically oppressed.  This talks directly about how the representation of youth and others who are systematically oppressed are severely underrepresented.  About 2/3 of low-income (<$25,000/year) non-white families had access to the internet and computers for their children in 2021, which resulted in the cancellation of school for many of those children with no technology [2].  This irony explained through Bo's song shows how the representation of many systematically oppressed people online was undermined through the digital divide.  

NOTES

Globalization, Digital Divide, and Changes in Labor

• Labor changes to working inside of the home, issues with work ethic and wanting to work, which means he just makes content online (Content)

• Refers to healing the terrible world with comedy using his medium

  • Being a white guy, he jokes about using his internet medium to save the systematically oppressed ("appear to save the day")

  • Refers to racial and gender-based issues and jokes that his medium of jokes will save the day during the pandemic

  • Digital divide might not make this possible (Comedy)

• The world works to separate the workers from the means of production, world is built with exploitation (How the World Works)

• Exploitation of brands to use their online platform to say they fight for some cause, when really they want you to just buy into their products (~20mins in)

  • "Are you supporting Wheat Thins in their battle against Lyme Disease?"

• Cultural Impacts of Internet:

  • Internet encourages the same types of content and expression, which can lead to the flattening of culture and significant identities of people (White Woman's Instagram)

  • Love and Social exchange have been reduced to texting and the lack of emotion and increase predictability that comes with it (Sexting)

• Digital Divide: Everyone expresses their opinions on every single event that occurs using the internet "Can any single person shut the f**k up about any single thing for about an hour"(25:30)

• Labor Exploitation in the Modern World (Unpaid Intern) Also in Automation

• Critiques influence of power in online figures like Jeff Bezos, which has had a large role in globalization of technology and automation (Bezos 1) Also in Automation

  • "Allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the nuerochemical drama of our children for profit, maybe that was a bad call by us.  Maybe the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a... lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody except for... a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley... maybe that as a way of life forever, maybe that's not good." (31min in)

• It covers the intense availability of online information and entertainment, discussing the generational differences in how media was used "circa '99" to today's intent of being an onslaught of media. (Welcome to the Internet).

  • The song gets faster when discussing today's content streams,  which seems to be intentional to symbolize the increased speed of content moving through the internet and how quickly our attention can be diverted to the newest concepts and slows on the older uses.

Monitoring

• Maybe a stretch, but the video game part has a sense of monitoring where Bo Burnham in the game has the ability to cry and acts like a video game character that is trapped in the room, while he is also controlling the game with commentary that seems to show no life or concern to the weird emotion and game play that he is doing, especially after 253 days in the game. 

Automation

• People are expected to constantly create and consume media (Comedy)

• The world can only work when everything works together (How the World Works)

  • Refers to the communications between organisms, but could possibly relate to a world where humans and computers are forced to work together

• Labor Exploitation in the Modern World (Unpaid Intern) Also in Changes in Labor

  • Pumping out content of little value to seem intelligent

    • Discusses the insecurities of people posting online and that people get defensive before others can (Unpaid Intern)

  • Critiques influence of power in online figures like Jeff Bezos, which has had a large role in globalization of technology and automation (Bezos 1) Also in Globalization

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Works Cited

[1]  Silver H. Working from Home: Before and After the Pandemic. Contexts (Berkeley Calif). 2023 Mar 2;22(1):66-70. doi: 10.1177/15365042221142839. PMID: 36913215; PMCID: PMC9988592. 

[2]  Golden AR, Srisarajivakul EN, Hasselle AJ, Pfund RA, Knox J. What was a gap is now a chasm: Remote schooling, the digital divide, and educational inequities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Curr Opin Psychol. 2023 Aug;52:101632. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101632. Epub 2023 Jun 12. PMID: 37437380; PMCID: PMC10259090.