Comedian Nathan McIntosh's default state on stage is having a stroke.he is a stand-up dahlia The character, Mr. DeMartino, interrupts his joke telling with a sudden shift into a deafening octave, with a vein threatening to burst from his forehead.In his new YouTube stand-up special ignore technologyMcIntosh, is a regular at New York clubs and has appeared several times. tonight show and TThe Late Show with Stephen Colbertchanneling his anger into a natural outlet: the tech industry.
YouTube features tend to be practical. Comedians have little incentive to build specials around a unifying theme because they know their material will be consumed through short clips on social media.in ignore technology, Macintosh bucks this trend. By staying true to the theme of the title, he differentiates this special from the dozens of aesthetically similar club hours uploaded to YouTube each month.
McIntosh opens his set by mentioning how easy it is to “just sit at home and scroll,” which allows him to jump right into an anti-technology attack. “Even in places like coffee shops, menus on the wall are now screens,” he says, speaking a bit about the unnecessary proliferation of digital interfaces in public places. “I walk into the store to check the price of my coffee, but before I can see it, it cuts to a short film about a little Guatemalan boy riding into town on a donkey. Then another video of his mother pouring beans into a gunny bag. ” He put his finger to his temple, clearly in pain, and then exclaimed, “Wow, how much is a muffin?!” Another standout part highlights how ridiculous it is for the filmmakers to make three separate movies about Steve Jobs and then imagine a horrifying fourth one made from a Chinese perspective. are doing. I was just flying around the warehouse saying, “Make me a cell phone!'' You can't commit suicide! If you jump out of the window, the net will bounce you back into the building! ”
Throughout his hour-long performance, McIntosh also tackles the overwhelming information overload caused by social media, the addictive nature of cell phones, and the troubling rise of artificial intelligence. His criticisms build on each other to form a larger discussion about the myopia of the industry's relentless solutionism. “Just because a tech geek made it doesn't mean you have to use it,” he argues. “They don't care if things can hurt us or not, you know what I mean? They just sit in a room and are like, 'Beep beep bop beep.' , create something that the rest of us will all have to fight for someday.”
ignore technology It's not perfect. Several of Mackintosh's jokes are based on false premises, and there's one digression about aging that has a strained connection to the overall theme. But this special manages to blend content and form in a way that many club hours don't attempt. McIntosh speaks clearly to his audience about the pervasive influence of technology, about which he strengthens his point with nearly an hour of documentation. His particular anger is as relentless as the proliferation of technology. “For God's sake, leave humans alone,” he pleads, with a bit of a complaint about the replacement of human labor by technology. “Why can't robots drive trucks?” Why should humans drive trucks? ” I don't know. Probably because robots don't have mortgages! ”
He is the proverbial “old man screaming at the clouds.” Sorry, he's the proverbial yelling old man. of cloud.
