The title may look a tad peculiar to the untrained eye, so let us take it systematically.
As far as the "stories" part is concerned, this may be a bit -- or a lot, depending on the perspective -- too much: the shit I took this morning is perhaps as much of a story as the thing I'm going to present, albeit from a certain point it's much more, since the smell was more pungent, for one. From another point of view though, this is as much of a story as the so-called "pantsuit internets" can tell, and in addition it has a certain genuineness that one can't seem to find anywhere these days, at least not on the world wide web.
As for the "smelly pits" of "pantsuit internets", you can perhaps guess my meaning here: out of sheer curiosity, I've used some of my spare time to dig through alphabet.usg's TV1 platform; well, not used per se, since other people do that for me without my even asking them. Anyway, I spent around eight hours in the last three months watching some dude's YouTube channel, and this alone, i.e. the fact that I didn't stop after the first few minutes, should be proof enough that I'm not writing this piece in vain. This should about cover "pantsuit internets" then; as for the smelly pits, read on.
Thus, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the one and only (at least as far as I know) Iu Da.
Going under the motto "te duci dracu", i.e. "you're going straight to hell", our Das Ju is on a first glance simply a mere collection of videos. Of a dude. Driving a minivan. On the streets and roads of Romania. See what I said earlier about my shit this morning? How could a dude recording his deliveries from one part of the country to the other be even remotely interesting, right? Well, at times the dude in question does some funny commentary on the stuff he shows us; but that's not what drew me in. What drew me in is that a. all his stuff is uncut; b. the stuff itself, rather than the commentary, is fucking real; and c. extra points for originality, I don't know of anyone else doing this kind of thing on the whole web2. There's maybe more to it, but let's begin to dig into this already.
As far I can discern, Iu Da's videos can be cut into the following categories. The first category -- the least interesting of all, I'd say -- comprises videos of some dude on the road, yelling and swearing at idiots who do the stupid. I don't know how automobile drivers act west of the Atlantic, say; I do know how Western Europe does it, and let me tell you, they ain't got nothing on Romanians3. The dudes, and especially some of the chicks are going particularly crazy once they touch the steering wheel and the gas pedal. I don't know why the fuck they're so idiotic, as if they're all in a damn hurry to jump in their graves all of a sudden, but as a driver in Romania, especially the southern and eastern parts, it's nearly impossible to use a car without going insane from all the stupid with a driver's license4. So then, Iu Da is, portrayed in this context, no more and no less than a documentary depicting the roads and streets of Romania -- all big and raw, what more could you expect from a documentary?
In the second category of Iu Distic videos we have short stories where our driver picks up random hitchhikers on the road and takes them places. This category can be further divided into sub-categories, spread along the types of people transported by the dude: we have the stupid, only this time they're speaking; then we have the horribly misguided, really what was that young girl doing in the fields in the middle of the night? Maybe she was whoring, wasn't she? Well, hold your horses there, we've just begun. We also have whores, yes, such as the whore with the kid, who admits she's taking clients while the young one's watching. Long story short, there you have it, rural Romania of the 2010s in all its filth, too bad the people speak exclusively Romanian. I doubt anyone's ever going to bother translating any of the pieces there; still, this only adds to the documentary value, my guess is the alien anthropologists in 252525 will be thoroughly satisfied if they find this.
Finally, there's a third category which the naïve eye can easily confuse with the second. From time to time, our hero stops at a road's edge and... well, he didn't show us the moments when he's taking a piss, but he does make a point of picking on hookers. No, not picking them up; after he draws their attention, he then proceeds to have a conversation with them on somewhat diverse subjects, usually revolving around how much she asks for blowjob/anal/normal. This is informative, in that we now know that Romanian whores circa 2019 would go as low as six bucks for a fuck. And not only that, but if your patience doesn't wear off meanwhile, you'll notice the smart whores, along with the very stupid ones, along with... I'm guessing if the dude keeps this on, by 2021 he'll have enough material for a complete research of prostitution in Romania.
So yes, Lucian is looking at TV, you may now laugh all you like, I'll laugh along with you, although perhaps not for the same reasons. Oh, did I make you curious now? Well, let's give this article a proper conclusion then.
I like Iu Da. He may not be the brightest guy out there, sure, and his videos start getting boring after a while, especially since there's so much you can show of Romanian roads before you start repeating yourself. Still, I like him, for the following reason, and please do feel free to challenge this: I like him because he's done more for the field of sociology than the Romanian academia managed to these past two supposedly illustrious decades of great heights of science. Yes, he posted a bunch of shitty videos instead of going for peer-reviewed papers, and yes, he's giving you the raw material to digest instead of doing careful analyses. Still, if his bunch of mere shitty videos have more documentary value than the whole pile of "gender studies" and whatnot...
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Back in 2014 I wrote an article entitled "Online media is feeding on your tears". It was obvious to me as much as it is now, although I didn't explicitly state it in the text, that this so-called online media is precisely a reheated-soup version of the older yet as much as perverse medium of television. The main difference between the two and, let's say, the great progress, keks, is that the new TV has successfully closed a feedback loop, by allowing the users to leave comments on the stuff they're consuming.
There are two problems with this view: for one, this shiny feedback loop isn't specific to social media, in fact blogs and forums closed the loop way before anyone was thinking of social networks, or even the web, perhaps as far back as Usenet. And for the other, as opposed to (some) blogs, the vast majority of material generated by "users" isn't in any way more valuable than what the average Markov text generator -- don't take my words for granted, did you ever read comments on any platform fashionable nowadays? How does the average comment look, then? Because it's so easy to determine an average, on whatever quantitative basis you may choose.
So what I'm saying is that in some sense these shits, i.e. Zuck et al., have it all backwards. That is, instead of using their super-ultra-trained software engineers to write a buncha ad-hoc text generators, like yours truly did wahahay back eight years ago, they're spending tons of resources, mainly processing power, to employ "sentiment analysis" and whatnot in order to extract some sort of meaning from the spew. And they say it's working, and... well, who am I to argue. ↩
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Though this probably indicates a lack of post-pop-culture on my part rather than any quality specific to the item under examination. For all I know, the youtubes are chock full of Iu Das, one more (or less) interesting than the other. For what it's worth, I'm not inclined to go looking for them, this one was more than sufficient to sate my hunger for the weird. ↩
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Who in turn don't compare to the Turks, who I suppose are nothing when compared to Indians. There seems to be a gradient here going west to east, although to be honest I haven't looked at this in enough detail to state it with confidence. ↩
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For the record, I don't have one. And in case you're still wondering why, reread the paragraph referencing this footnote. ↩
In the very same category (how could I forget?!) lies a bunch of gold, a gem among gems: Vax Populi.
Răzvan Anghelescu documents life in the Romanian country through a very simple device: by querying his fellow Romanians, on matters that are sometimes very simple, while othertimes they're overwhelmingly, or mayhaps offensively complicated. The golden moment being said Romanian's reaction to the question, which as far as I can see reveals bit by bit the fate of these miserable people. They're to forever stick to herding sheep, unable as they find themselves to do anything else; at least as long as there's still sheep left on Mother Earth, că dupe aia... Dumnezeu cu mila.
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