It’s too easy to get tied up in politics and see all of social media in that light. But there’s much more, and it’s not all clickbait and softcore either. There is good optimistic content out there that informs, entertains, and amuses without politics playing a big part.
So today I’m going to continue to offer some respite from politics. There is plenty of that on PJ Media today, so consider this your coffee break.
Cleo Abram
My favorite of the recent batch is Cleo Abram, who has developed almost three million YouTube subscribers in less than a year since starting her column.
Abram is a graduate of Vox, and you might think she would be heading off toward the left. Instead, she decided to take a really new approach: she is concentrating on optimistic tech news. In an interview for, of all things, a health and beauty site Into the Gloss, she explained it this way:
I notice that on Tiktok, [where she has been developing new content recently] there’s a lot of content about how the world is getting worse. I don’t think that’s irrational, but I do think it can be harmful—I would like to make things about the very real opportunities for things to go right.
I think this is something that’s missing from a lot of current internet content: the sense that things may go wrong but that things can go right.
This is a rather brilliant explanation of why online voting is a bad idea.
I want to recommend one of Cleo’s videos in particular, as it’s on something I’ve been thinking about for a while: nuclear waste. There is a lot of anti-nuclear mythology about nuclear waste, so she explores — and demolishes — the notion that nuclear waste is an impossible risk.
Kurtzgesagt
Kurtzgesagt is a German word that means, literally, “Said shortly” or idiomatically “in a nutshell.” On YouTube, Kurtzgesagt is a German animation studio that makes amusing and (almost always) optimistic animated stories explaining some scientific concept across an amazingly wide range of topics, from the after-effects of nuclear war to how to survive falling without a parachute. The best part is that they actively resist doomerism.
They have a video on mpox — you remember, monkeypox. They explain where it came from and why it’s not COVID, in calm measured words. (I didn’t embed it because it’s a YouTude Short, for which YouTube refuses to hand out an embed code.)
This video in particular inspired me to think about doomerism as a problem.
I don’t think there’s a Kurtzgesagt video I don’t like, but I want to recommend one in particular: a one-hour video of the entire history of the earth, 4.5 billion years, set to perky electronic music. You’ll probably learn something, and it’s great background music when reading or writing.
Dami Lee
Dami Lee is a recent discovery for me. She’s an architect, video producer, and YouTuber who basically has a fertile and creative mind that explores things you wouldn’t normally think about as related to architecture, like the visual language of the anime movie the meaning and implications of the black star and Geidi Prime in the recent Dune movie.
I think this was the first of her videos that really got my attention.
Doobydobap
Tina, who goes by the handle doobydobap, is a Korean woman who — in theory — is a food blogger. I’m including her in this list, instead of a post about good food bloggers (you all will let me know if you want a lot of food bloggers, right?), because while she talks a lot about food and does a lot of cooking instruction videos, she also is traveling the world talking about the places she goes and the people she meets.
This struck me as she was exploring the food courts in Singapore. Now, Singapore is one of my favorite places in the world — when I used to visit Singapore as a consultant, I loved it. The food, the people — I didn’t miss chewing gum.
So Tina, while she’s talking about the food, is really talking about Singapore.
I would like to know how she stays so skinny, though.
More coming?
I have a much bigger collection than I have used in this article. So, like the spacepo — astronomical eye candy — posts, this is sort of an experiment. What did you think of these? Do you want more links to interesting, informative, and optimistic creators?
