RME DOUBLE FEATURE: Psychology Today (Extreme Animals) & Classic Parts R.G. Miller

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

(Extreme Animals) - 

A group of children, in a found footage fragment I’ll armchair carbon-date to the late 1980s, sit slack-jawed and prone in front of a television. The flickering of the cathode ray bathes their faces in an angelic white light. They’re in jammies, piled together, lulled into a stupor at the eleventh hour of a slumber party in the basement of whoever’s mom and dad gives them unlimited screen time. The TV unfurls an endless auto-generating playlist of videos. Each has a wordy title rammed with keywords, a nod to the algorithmically-cued, computer-generated nightmare fuel that populates the darker waters of children’s YouTube. They flutter and decay at unimaginable speeds. It can only be an Extreme Animals joint.   The writer James Bridle, in his 2017 essay “Something is wrong on the internet,” framed the disturbing videos common on children’s YouTube as the inevitable, sinister consequence of…