i swore i wouldn't write a 4th of july post but then this happened

'the citizen kane of asmr', America, and me

Its Wednesday morning and I’m hungover from being an American, where at least I know I’m free.

I am in an AirBnB in the Angeles mountains with Robert our dog. We’re here because Robert cannot handle the fireworks (I’m writing a separate essay for The New Yorker Both Are True on this - look for that soon).

I open my local newspaper’s website - The New York Times to find this:

My posture sucks, so the title grabs me.

I love clickbait-y twists, so the subtitle grabs me even tighter. Now I’m sitting like shit with one knee up and out while the other is on the floor of this patio in the Angeles forest reading this essay and I’m reading and finally it’s revealed that this video is an ASMR video.

Note: this link gets you the whole god damn essay no paywall no bullshit

ASMR is a…genre of content - usually video - that calms people down with nice sounding noises that are recorded with better equipment than The Beatles used for their “music albums.”

Common sounds include popping, keyboard clacking, whispering, tapping, and crinkling things

This is Gibi, a popular ASMR YouTuber. Her latest video has 309k views, and her top videos have 53 million views. That’s a lot!

Here’s Gibi’s top vid:

In this one, Gibi pretends to be your dentist on speed and very quickly counts your teeth, says “ok you have teeth” (v funny tbh), and then gives you a 2 minute tops dental exam in which she finds nothing wrong. Aspirational, sure, but realistic?

The vibe is…manic pixie x calming x Super Positive, like Gabi loves looking at your teeth they’re perfect amazing wonderful and even if she found a tooth that’d turned into a Warhead because you ate so much candy, she’d tell you it was perfect.

Remember the candy Warheads?

What’s going on here with the branding and logo? The guy’s sucking down something sour, sure, but is he just thinking ‘warheads’ like in a little think bubble? No I see its an explosion from an actual bomb that went off in his brain. The bomb was so advanced that when it exploded inside his brain it also spelled out the name of the bomb in a nice yellow-orange gradient.

You don’t see much gradient-based marketing these days…

With or without the gradient, Warheads could never be launched today.

It was invented in 1975, the height of the ADD WAR HERE.

in 1999, Warheads were referred to as a "$40 million brand" (USD).^[1]

These days, the wokestream media snowflake ecofriendly complex only lets bullshit candy like BUNCH OF BANANAS be released into the market.

I dont care what a candy IS I need to know what it will DO to my BRAIN when I SUCK IT DOWN.

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Back to ASMR

There’s a specific kind of ASMR called “unintentional ASMR” which is basically when you make an oopsie-dasie didn’t-mean-ta nice sounding video:

As I got to know the ASMR community’s creators, tropes and niches, I learned about a subgenre known as “unintentional ASMR,” which spans everything from movie scenes with delicate Foley effects (“Phantom Thread,” “Edward Scissorhands”) to a video of a woman rapturously describing the wares at a local curtain store. In contrast to role-play videos, this category captures ASMR out in the wild. Unintentional ASMR is arguably the original form of ASMR: Long before the genre began to flourish on YouTube, before anyone had assigned a name to the feeling, people were experiencing the tingles in everyday life.

What the hell does this have to do with posture I ask myself, my right foot crossed over my left as the sun beams down on just my right arm from the sun in the forest

As far as I’m concerned, the crown jewel of unintentional ASMR is a 14-minute video that was uploaded seven years ago to a channel that has no other content. In “Alexander Technique lesson with Diana Devitt-Dawson,” a woman teaches a law student how to sit down and stand up from a chair without causing excess strain on the body. Devitt-Dawson, the instructor, makes microscopic adjustments to her pupil’s posture and movement, all the while issuing an enigmatic catchphrase: “Allow the neck to be free.” Presumably filmed as an educational video on the Alexander Technique, a method of posture and movement coaching, the video has all the soporific features of a winning ASMR video. Even the video’s color palette is subdued, with a theme of gray and muddy purple.

The paragraph below made me do actually, in real life, l-o-l (laugh out loud) on two separate occasions

Boring as it sounds, this video has become a cult object. It now has 5.6 million views and more than 4,300 comments, with new ones added on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Fans, some of whom claim to watch the video nightly, have called it “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of ASMR videos” and “possibly the greatest 14 minutes in ASMR history.” The video is mesmerizing, in large part because it’s an utter mystery. What does it mean to allow the neck to be free? (Is that phrase the “Rosebud” of the ASMR world?) Precisely what modifications is Devitt-Dawson making to her student’s posture? (As one commenter notes, “Watched this literally 1,000 times and I still have no idea how to do the Alexander Technique.”) Who is Devitt-Dawson, the YouTube star with a single video on her channel?

Well there it is - the video is…about fucking posture. Let’s give it a shot:

I’m watching the video now and its boring and not really working but also that’s because I am writing this while I do it

I decide to stop writing and just watch the video for two full human minutes

Ok I’m done and I have come to some conclusions:

• This woman, Diana Devitt-Dawson, is a con artist

• She is teaching an adult woman how to do things that the woman already knows how to do, namely sit and stand up

HOW IS THIS CALMING??? I AM SO FUCKING STRESSED WATCHING THIS

Will this poor woman named Geeti (who perhaps has been kidnapped??) ever get it right? CAN she get it right? Or will she forever be doomed to repeat her sit stand fate??

What is even stranger than this video are the comments to this video — people worship this video.

And this one which is super funny actually:

It doesn’t calm me down. Most ASMR videos don’t. I can’t stop thinking about what is happening in the lives of these two women or why people like watching other people be 2x dentists

And you know what, that’s okay. I harbor zero Old Man “The Hell is The Internet these days” anger and ire about any of this stuff. Quite the opposite!

ASMR is the exact type of subculture I normally would love and immediately become a member of, but with this one…I can’t, because, like most things, it stresses me out, given my upbringing as a jewish soviet child whose parents and culture are afraid of all things? Maybe.

But that’s the crazy thing about America (omg this is about to become an actual 4th of july post how the fuck did this happen)…

In the great US of A, we are more or less free to watch asmr videos about posture and dentists, to chomp down on warheads or bunches of banana, and to write about the experience of it all with no concern besides, “I hope Gibi doesn’t see this post, I really want her to like me.”

They are trivial things, yes, and that’s the point — in mother Russia, you worry about everything and how the government will see it. There is no great logic to it all, which creates in a population the fear that doing anything, like commenting on a video about posture, could get you put in jail.

Here, we do not worry all the time about every little thing. Or we do, but in a way that is free, or more free, than how it was and is in the USSR / many other places in the globe.

Like the editing of a great movie, freedom is invisible. You don’t notice it because it doesn’t make itself known, instead allowing you to enjoy the soundscape that washes over you from the Citizen Kane-esque legendary “Posture for 14 minutes” video.

It doesn’t take a brain scientist to know there’s so much wrong with the US — but I’d still rather be here where it feels like the ability to change things, to make them better, is more real than not.

I finish the article about the posture stuff and read the comments. the first one makes me wanna cry and so I decide to end this essay with it:

I was gonna paywall this essay but then a hummingbird flew like A FOOT AWAY FROM MY FACE and I took that as a sign that I shouldn’t paywall it so its FREE for everyone but hey maybe still you wanna become a paid subscriber it’d mean a lot for my career as a dumb liltle writer

Comments

1. Do you like ASMR

2. What subcultures are you a part of? Or fascinated by?

3. What do you think about this as a format for more essays also its sort of pathetic to even ask this sort of thing like if you like writing these Alex just keep writing them I KNOW THAT

4. how was your 4th and how is your 5th and how will your 6th

7. I gotta check out of this airbnb by 11am and its 1010am and I wanna go use their hot tub because why not so I’m gonna just publish this now