These Coca-Cola Tricks Are As Pointless As They Are Entertaining.
In pursuit of life hacks, madness can be consumed. The whole world becomes both a hammer and a nail. Is the power cord a jump rope? Is a sponge a pad for needles? Can anything become anything if you have the time, effort, and shopping for crafts?
In the video above, taken from the DIY LHack TV YouTube channel , hacks are freed from the context of the real world, turning objects into other objects for the sake of it. These are tricks without magic. Tic Tac box and atomizer transforms into a spray bottle. (Just … get the bottle?) The bottle cap, lollipop, and some hot glue turn into a rough seal. (Why lollipop and not a toothpick?)
In Select All, Brian Feldman compares the video to the creepy VHS in The Ring , a feature film that kills its viewers. The so-called “life hack” video above is indeed in the “weirdly satisfying video” genre , in which disembodied hands slice up candy-colored gels, mix viscous liquids, and trim objects to precise dimensions. They lack any content that you could meaningfully pass on to another person, but they are perfect for YouTube’s recommended algorithms, with their low production costs, simple thumbnails, and“You’ll want to watch to the end” headlines. (They are also the subject of Lee Alexander’s elegant story .)
Their appeal as a mundane magic trick stems from the appeal of home hacking: it’s nice to see things used in unexpected or “appropriate” ways. But most good magic tricks have the same answer: the magician has spent too much time developing, practicing, and doing this trick. So the creators of “8 AMAZING PLEASURES COCA-COLA!” the creators put in much more work than necessary to create each item. Below, they create a Coke-flavored ice cream topping by mixing Coke with sugar and powdered gelatin, then injecting it into an empty tube of toothpaste and placing it in the refrigerator. The tube of toothpaste gets cleaned and pumped again off-screen because watching this messy process will ruin the magic.
Nobody needs these hacks; probably no one tries them. There is a theory of fake news that denying it and checking the facts is pointless because the people who spread it don’t care if it’s true . They refuse to check before spreading the news because all they really need is emotion, to justify their pre-existing beliefs.
I think this is the case with these videos; they speak the language of hacking, but are created and distributed without regard to their value as hacking. “Hack” is just a word that helps a “weirdly enjoyable video” break into YouTube’s how-to section. Like “HD” or “original,” “hack” is a previously meaningful word that now exists only for videos to appear in search results and “related” widgets.
So I don’t need to tell you to avoid these hacks. It doesn’t even make sense to mock them. They exist to give you feeling. And as the fake news says, it could have been done much worse.