by Ronny Chieng’s Netflix special gets better with age.
Take this already great bit about Amazon Prime and how it encapsulates America, and remember, he wrote and performed this pre-pandemic.
As I wrote back in December:
Chieng delivers a brilliant analogy early on in his hour, observing how the Internet is somehow only making society dumber despite containing all of the world’s knowledge. He does so with a series of examples predicting a future world in which we treat the Internet like we treat smoking now. The best example arrives last: “Secondhand stupidity’s a real killer.”
It’s easy to joke about how Americans have gotten fat, or lazy, or stupid due to our excesses. Chieng’s observations go deeper, though, highlighting how abundance has led to absurd waste and even more absurd expectations. “There’s so much stuff!” he notes. “Every day, new stuff. It’s like Christmas every day!” Just count, he tells us, how many screens (watch, phone, laptop, TV) we place between our eyes and the wall in front of us. And despite living with the knowledge of an impending global climate crisis, we’re triple-bagging our take-out food and stuffing those bags with napkins; and insisting on same-day delivery with everything in its own cardboard packaging.
“Where do we go from here, as a civilization?” Joking or not, it’s a valid question.
