Steve Jobs’s Ghost Doesn’t Want You to See This
Comedian Nathan Macintosh’s default state onstage is apoplexy. He’s the stand-up equivalent of the Daria character Mr. DeMartino, punctuating joke deliveries by abruptly shifting into a deafening octave, his blood vessels perilously close to bursting out of his forehead. In his new YouTube stand-up special Down With Tech, Macintosh, a New York club fixture who’s made several appearances on The Tonight Show and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, channels his rage into a deserving outlet: the tech industry.
YouTube specials have a tendency to be utilitarian. Comedians know the material will be consumed via short clips on social media, so they have little incentive to build their specials around unifying themes. In Down With Tech, Macintosh bucks this trend. By remaining faithful to the titular theme throughout, he distinguishes this special from the dozens of aesthetically similar club hours uploaded to YouTube each month.
Macintosh opens the set by noting how easy it is “to just sit home and scroll,” which allows him to jump straight into his anti-tech tirade. “Even, like, coffee shops and stuff, the menu on the wall is now a screen,” he says in a bit about the needless ubiquity of digital interfaces in public places. “You walk in to check for the price of coffee, and before you can even see it, it flips over to a short film of a small Guatemalan boy riding a donkey into town. Then there’s another video of a mother pouring beans into a burlap sack.” He touches his fingers to his temple in visible distress, then screams, “Cool, how much are the muffins?!” Another standout bit highlights how absurd it is that filmmakers have made three separate movies about Steve Jobs, then imagines a terrifying fourth made from China’s perspective: “He’s going to be a 75-foot-tall winged creature who breathes fire. Just flying around a warehouse like, ‘Make my phones! You can’t kill yourself! If you jump out a window, a net bounces you right back into the building!’”
Macintosh also tackles the overwhelming information overload caused by social media, the addictiveness of cell phones, and the troubling rise of artificial intelligence over the course of the hourlong performance. His criticisms build upon one another and form a bigger argument about the short-sightedness of the industry’s relentless solutionism. “Just because a tech nerd made it doesn’t mean we have to use it,” he argues. “They don’t care if things can hurt us, you know what I mean? They just sit in a room, and they’re like, ‘Beep boop bop bop beep,’ and they make something that the rest of us are all going to have to fight one day.”
Down With Tech isn’t perfect. A few of Macintosh’s jokes rely on false premises, and there’s one extended digression about aging where the connection to the overarching theme is strained. But the special succeeds at marrying its content to its form in a way that many club hours don’t attempt. Macintosh tells the audience about tech’s pervasive effects explicitly, but he also reinforces his thesis by generating nearly an hour of material about it. With his signature fury, he’s as unrelenting as the spread of the technology he laments. “Leave people alone, for God’s sake,” he pleads during a bit about human labor being replaced by technology: “‘Why can’t a robot drive a truck? Why does a human being have to drive a truck?’ I don’t know. Maybe because a robot doesn’t have a mortgage!”
He’s the proverbial “old man yelling at cloud.” Sorry, he’s the proverbial old man yelling at the cloud.
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