THE ASMR CURE

摘要

Last summer the candymaker Reese posted a feature-length video on YouTube called Reese the Movie. In a Reese-orange room, five popular YouTubers sit around a Reese-orange table and whisper into their headsets about the pleasures of peanut butter cups. They compare notes on the best way to open a Reese packet. (Cue amplified sounds of packets whooshing across the table and fingernails clicking on wrappers.) The candies topple free with the clunk of wooden blocks. The breathless council dismantles them, scooping into the cups with apple corers and smooshing them under spatulas, releasing soft, sliding squeaks like trampled snow. They slice them like bread, each chop cartoonishly loud. After 80 minutes, our protagonists come at last to the intended destiny of these fluted UFOs: They eat them. The end. ■ What we're watching, or rather having, according to the video's tagline, is "an ASMR experience." I find it hard to gauge how well-known ASMR is. In savvier digital circles, and among my 18-year-old students, it usually elicits a familiar chuckle. But when I bring it up to my thirtysomething peers, they tend to look at me blankly. So here is the requisite unboxing of the acronym: autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR is an umbrella under which many millions of people huddle to make and listen to amplified sounds of mundane events—bars of soap being scraped, a whisk hitting the side of a bowl, tissue paper crackling, instruction manuals read out in one prolonged whisper. Fans return to their favorite "ASMRtists," like the Reese whisperers, for the intensely pleasurable tingles or chills these sounds produce. Move over, Seinfeld; ASMR is truly "the show about nothing."