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deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated” (p. 43). Consider the popular computer game The Sims, in which you create a character and control it through what amounts to a pretty mundane life (at least, compared to the action and adventure found in other video games). The character has to eat, go to the bathroom, stay clean, go to work to make money, and so on. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it strikes me that a Sims character would resemble your own character inside Nozick’s experience machine. So if your “sim” is able to become a rock star in the game, have you actually accomplished anything by plugging in? Do you somehow feel better about your own life, excluding the minor relaxation and enjoyment you’d get from playing any game? It doesn’t seem that you would. And the same would hold true for the “you” that is in the experience machine. You’re not actually doing or accomplishing anything at all. Sure, the experience machine might offer pleasure, but more important than that are our actual accomplishments and our struggles to live in and understand the real world.

You’re Living in a Fantasy World, This Beautiful World

How might all this apply to the issue of child labor which “All I Need” addresses? It shows one of the reasons why the video’s combination of ethos, pathos, and logos is so compelling. As many writers about Radiohead have noted, their work addresses and criticizes the Baudrillardian, Matrix-like quality of our media-saturated culture. In a way, we are all “plugged in” to Nozick’s machine in the form of televisions, radios, movies, and the internet that constantly bombard us with images, stories, and claims that can seem credible and reasonable, if only because they survive a news cycle or appear in different venues. The quotation from linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky featured on the “Airbag / How Am I Driving?” EP suggests how this interconnecting web of ethos, pathos, and logos (which I marked in brackets) works in politics:

It is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling [pathos] that they are incompetent to deal with complex and important issues [logos]: they’d better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire [ethos] and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and to control international affairs. (Noam Chomsky, in J. Peck, ed., The Chomsky Reader, pp. 42-43)

This star system might even convince you that child-labor exploitation is not such a bad thing. Suppose you see a popular news story on rising prices that reminds you to appreciate how inexpensive imported shoes are. Suppose you’ve also seen a touching interview with families in Indonesia or Thailand who are happy to make any money at all in local factories. You might then question these arguments against child labor by asking: Is it really the greatest good for the greatest number if we don’t exploit children? Maybe more people are better off if we do! Or, you might simply let the question fade into the background of modern life, with suffering children taking the part of just more images floating around “out there” somewhere in the world news cycles, headlines and images. The “realness” of the suffering and unfairness, in other words, can be lost, regardless of how clear or rigorous our cognitive arguments about exploitive child labor may be.

That’s why the video for “All I Need” is a slap in the face. It punctures the hyperreality we’re all plugged into. The reality and problems with child labor become immediate and apparent through that split-screen analysis. Even though cognitively I’d already accepted that child labor was wrong, the video still served as a wake up call. It brought forth the reality and the nature of the problems of child labor in a way that no cognitive argument could.

The members of Radiohead themselves aren’t actually doing philosophy, of