As I neglected to explain this in my last piece, let me explain it here instead...

One of the most wonderful things about a lot of the kind of visual materials that I watch online these days (as I have no TV any more, and no desire to have one again) is that it is faceless - the presenter is experienced only as a disembodied voice, and is substituted by other visual materials. This in contrast to most “traditional” televisual material, in which there is usually at least one regular presenter whose face is therefore familiar to us.

I wanted to get my message out, but I never wanted to be actually on the screen: I had already arrived at the point of regarding traditional TV shows as being somewhat narcissistic, populated by characters whose prime motivation seemed to be in the public eye, irrespective of how idiotic their utterances might prove to be. More latterly, of course, there have been more of these people in the legacy news media, although thankfully they seem to be getting the elbow more and more. If you are American you can probably name a couple of dozen of these people easily, as these are the ones who have been displaying excessive Trump Derangement Syndrome and getting kicked out of their hideously well-paid positions, from which they have been spouting out garbage propaganda against anyone they disagree with. Unfortunately, some of them have not been fired yet (*cough*cough*Rachel Maddow*cough*), but we live in hope, if only for the sheer entertainment value of seeing their eventual hilarious meltdowns.

Remembering the kinds of people we still discuss today centuries or even millennia after their passing, undoubtedly because their ideas are still actually worthy of discussion in this apparently mindless age, it is possible that, for example, we have some idea of what they looked like because their faces were carved into statuary, or painted by an artist, or possibly even from a life or death mask, yet it is not their faces that we see in our minds when we hear or watch a performance of their works. We know perfectly well what composers such as Beethoven, Bach or Tschaikowsky looked like, but their music is what we focus on, possibly intermingled with pictures in our imaginations as we listen. Ideas, no matter who first proposes them, stand on their own merits, and are not automatically superior to the ideas of others simply because of who originated them. If we listen to a person discussing their ideas on the radio or a podcast, we focus on their ideas and not on what they might (or what they actually do) look like as a person. And if we watch, say, a performance of Shakespeare, we focus on the performance. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with characters with whom we sympathise to a greater or lesser degree; he uses them as a medium to transmit his ideas. It is not necessary to have his own image in our minds as we experience the flow of his ideas.

With this kind of backdrop, the “faceless” presenter is a wonderful antidote to the narcissism of traditional media. The output of creators like TFM, RGE, Essentialsalts, Eternalised, etc. are entertaining and even though we do not see them physically we are free to agree or disagree with their ideas, or even to adopt them if we find them especially agreeable; but this trend is healthy precisely because of its fundamentally anti-narcissistic nature. So, I decided to follow along and produce entirely faceless videos.

What, then, made me choose this faceless guy? Well, long sessions chatting with Grok (what a surprise) produced the idea of an investigator, his face forever in darkness beneath a fedora. From my point of view, this was a good idea because it simultaneously provided anonymity whilst also (as there was no face) could represent a kind of “everyman” figure - it could be nobody, but it could be anybody; it could be you.

At the same time, “he” would function as a target for the projection of the viewer’s experiences, a figure in whom no confidence needed to be invested, but who could also serve as a means to express humour - in line with the idea that, since an essential feature of any real hypothesis is its falsifiability, it would be illogical and unreasonable to invest anything in a mere idea - pointing immediately to the weakness of those who actually do invest emotionally in ideas which must eventually be shown to be incorrect.

Finally, to create most of the images used in my videos, I use a range of free online AIs and it is very difficult to get these to express exactly what I have in mind. Since I cannot get exactly what I want, rather than getting irate at constant failure, why not take advantage of them and invoke a little humour? If science is a castle built on sand because it is simply a pile of falsifiable hypotheses, there is no point in taking it too seriously. Only a hundred years from today, people of the future will mock our errors.

This, then, was the origin of the Dark Guy, the Man With No Face who investigates the dumb ideas of our dumb era and questions them, offering alternatives along the way. He was created to represent resistance to the shallow narcissism of traditional media, according to which people whose faces are constantly in the public consciousness are somehow allowed to represent some kind of meaningless authority. These people form a familiar mask behind which reality is hidden, not revealed. Better to have no recognisable face than to misrepresent reality.