RAMBLE ON: "How the World Works" by Bo Burnham

So, here’s my question for anyone watching: What do you think “How the World Works” is about? Who is Bo Burnham sympathizing with in this sketch?

For those who haven’t watched it, Bo Burnham’s brilliant and occasionally insufferable comedy special INSIDE was immediately hailed as the defining artwork of the pandemic. Written as a way for Burnham to expend some kind of creativity during the lockdowns, Burnham presents a bunch of sketches and songs about loneliness, boredom and the phoniness and isolation of the Internet. Early on in it – for my money, the first really impressive moment of the special – he sings a bright upbeat children’s song about how society works by everyone working together – cooperation makes the world go round, just like all the animals in the forest make the ecosystem thrive, that’s the way the world works. Then he pulls out a sock puppet – literally just an unadorned gym sock – who bitterly tells him that his smiley-time understanding of society is all wrong. Society is nothing but misery and degradation, the strong exploiting the weak, the 1% of our capitalist hellscape consuming the poor like vampires, etc.

Bo reacts with surprise, a little disillusioned but moreso curious, and asks to know how he can help. Socko bitterly responds, “Read a book or something, I don’t know. Just don’t burden me with the responsibility of educating you. It’s incredibly exhausting.” The conversation devolves. The sock complains that Bo is trying to make this about himself and his own self-actualization rather than actually helping anyone. Bo, starting to get angry, threatens to remove the sock, sending him back to the horrifying unreal limbo Socko existed in before Bo put him on his hand. Socko cowers, and Bo, having established his dominance over the judgy annoying sock, sings happily, the status quo restored. Then Bo tears the screaming sock off his hand anyway.

I’m always curious how people interpret this sketch. Who’s the bad guy here? For me, the first thing that always strikes me is that the sock is a dick. Just, a giant dick. I can’t know for sure Bo’s intentions, I don’t think he’s trying to downplay the effects of hierarchical exploitation, but I still think Bo thinks of this sock as an unlikable asshole. “The FBI killed Martin Luther King,” says Socko, repeating a common but largely baseless conspiracy theory. A dig at the “pedophilic corporate elite” veers dangerously close to QAnon rhetoric. Bear in mind that Bo Burnham wrote this, and Bo Burnham does not exactly make bomb-throwing revolutionary comedy or anything. I’d doubt he thinks that “neoliberal fascists are destroying the left” or that private property is theft by definition. On some level he’s mocking people who think in those terms; Socko is the one who escalates the conversation into pointless, unnecessary hostility. I think Bo naturally sympathizes with his own character rather than the militant leftist sock, and on some level I think Bo the writer enjoys reminding Socko who’s boss.

On the other hand, self-criticism is a common theme in Bo Burnham’s comedy. Bo writes himself as childishly naïve, completely oblivious to even the possibility of injustice in the world, so he must think Socko has a point at least. Bo responds to Socko’s harsh comments by saying that he’s just trying to be a better person, and Socko yells at him again for making social issues about his own self-actualization; essentially this is Bo not only criticizing himself, but criticizing his own self-criticism (something he also does in the defining sketch of the special, his self-criticism becoming self-self-self-self-criticism until it becomes unbearable). When Bo (the character) has his privilege pushed upon, he happily uses it to inflict unjustifiable cruelties on Socko, again pushing the sympathy away from Bo. So what if Socko is snappish and overheated? He’s the one suffering in a way that Bo will never understand. So whose perspective is this sketch really from?

If you go to discussion forums like Reddit or more explicitly communist forums, you can see people dissecting this from every which way, which I think is fair: Yes it’s a mock-children’s song in a silly comedy, but how often do you see a mainstream entertainment like this saying “private property’s inherently theft”? From what I can tell, leftists mostly like it; they think Burnham is criticizing the sock’s tone but endorsing its ideas.  I don’t think that’s wrong, but it’s not exactly my interpretation of it. Whenever I share my thoughts on its perspective, though, I get shouted down (much like Socko!). Well, I have my own privileges, like a Patreon full of people ready to kiss my ass, so I’m going to share my interpretation here. Here’s what I think, when you drill deep down on it, is the perspective of “How the World Wants”:

The perspective is, Bo Burnham is going insane talking to a fucking sock on his hand.

Inside is a special about being trapped indoors with no one to talk to except the Internet; everything about it has to be understood by that perspective, and by the fact that Bo Burnham’s first instinct has always been to tear himself apart. There are elements of social satire in there, yeah, but what I mostly see is a rich white guy reading too much overheated Internet rhetoric, getting annoyed by it and then grappling with his own reaction to it. I might be projecting; I relate to Bo Burnham a little much, as both a piano-playing content creator and a helpless Twitter addict. Let us not forget that the lockdowns were also when the George Floyd protests broke out, after three years of a Trump presidency. When he got elected, I wanted to do nothing but be politically engaged; by the midterms I was so miserable and exhausted that I could barely think about it. That’s why for me “How the World Works” is not, to me, about two opposing worldviews and the mechanics of privilege; it’s about being too online. This is basically all Burnham has (at least as portrayed in this special); he has FaceTime with his mom, and he has the Internet – “everything, all of the time,” as he puts it, but also simultaneously nothing. This is what I remember of the lockdowns: having no company except the voices on social media, formless blobs with no faces but loud mouths being unproductively hostile, and ultimately feeling like you’re just talking to yourself.

There are points in Inside where I am repulsed by Burnham’s self-indulgence. I don’t care about Bo fretting about his problematic jokes. I don’t need to see him crying. Every second he self-flagellates about self-flagellating I get embarrassed for him, and then the embarrassment turns inward on every second I’ve spent thinking about myself. Social media is often called an echo chamber, but the echo chamber on display in “How the World Works” is in one’s own brain. Did you know social media use is way down? Not just because all of the social media sites have gotten shittier, but also people just spend more time in Discord, in group chats, in online spaces where you are not encouraged to be as anti-social and phony as possible. It feels a billion times more productive, though there’s still that anti-social disconnect. In the wake of the war in Israel/Palestine, Twitter has yet again become a sewer of pointless arguing, horrific opinions and misinformation. I’ve curtailed my social media use as much as I can and I can still feel my brain rotting from seeing it; I can’t help but feel like I’m not doing my part if I disengage. There’s gotta be something more productive than this, right? I guess. Read a book or something, I don’t know.