Shitposting in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction This Paper Will Explore
Zoë Sackman, 5/14/2015
Shitposting in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
This paper will explore “shitposting,” a unique form of internet humor that has evolved in the past five years to create a niche expressive outlet for the frustrations of the millennial generation. We will examine how the style and affect of shitposting, as well as the process behind its evolution, combine to create a uniquely relatable and political literary body of work which strives to process and respond to the anxieties of a life intertwined with the vast and overwhelming mechanizations of a failing capitalist society.
First, some history. The first occurrence of the word “shitposting” cropped up
Something Awful forums in 2007, where it was used to refer to a the act of posting something absolutely inane and meaningless on a thread with the intention of contributing nothing relevant to the conversation, perhaps to the point of derailment
(Mercer). A community of shitposters grew on Something Awful, before their migration to
Twitter in 2008. These shitposters formed the core of the community which is now known as “Weird Twitter,” the nexus of modern-day shitposting. We’ll be looking at two
Twitter accounts and a Tumblr blog which exemplify shitposting, and whose relationship to each other is particularly intriguing and relevant to our questions about what role shitposting plays for its audience.
The first shitposter, @Horse_ebooks, is a Twitter account that was spawned in
August 2010, originally created by Russian programmer Alexey Kouznetsov (Austin).
The original account posted exclusively nonsensical phrases accompanied by links to places one could purchase eBooks about horses. The phrases were generated by a
1 computer program and designed to evade spam detection because of their unpredictability. Examples of the most popular tweets from @Horse_ebooks follow:
2 The account gained significant popularity for being a shining example of shitposting, with the compelling addition of being a spambot. The account was later taken over by Buzzfeed contributor Jacob Bakkila, who continued to post in the style of the account, but with a slightly more developed sense of coherency, before terminating the account September of 2013 (Austin).
@Horse_ebooks became a pillar of the Weird Twitter community, despite (or perhaps because of) being a robot. The admirable combination of senselessness and poignancy evoked by @Horse_ebooks tweets influenced the direction of other, human,
Weird Twitter shitposters, and soon a text styling similar to that of a spambot
(inconsistent use of capitalization, poor grammar, and repeated phrases) was incorporated into the dominant style of shitposting (Mercer). Next to @Horse_ebooks, the next most famous Twitter shitposter is @dril.
@dril relies on narrative much more than @Horse_ebooks, and his tweets often take the form of several sentence small stories rather than simple phrases. The account is built around a character who is self-aware as a Twitter user and often makes reference to his followers, but whose aggressive shitpost ramblings remove him from reality. @dril has been run by a real person from the beginning, and although the identity of the poster is not known, he has conducted anonymous interviews describing the goals of his work as “ironic, satirical” and an attempt to “impress my unseen superiors and grant [@dril] a promotion to a higher plane of existence” (RandomMan).
Examples of popular @dril posts follow:
3 4 The final and most recent shitposter we’ll look at is Tumblr’s Shitpost Generator.
Shitpost Generator is a blog operated by a Java program, which uses a text generator to create shitposts and uploads them regularly (Shitpost Generator). Shitpost Generator was created not to be a random text generator like @Horse_ebooks, but rather specifically to create text that resembles a shitpost (which, in turn, resembles random text generation because of the nature of shitposting). Some popular Shitpost Generator posts include:
5 Now that we’ve covered a brief primer on shitposting and taken a look at some key examples, we’re going to begin thinking about what it is that makes these posts popular with their audience. Chances are, if you don’t occupy shitposting circles, you may not find the above posts particularly interesting, relatable, or at all funny. This may be because the foundation that gives shitposting traction with the millennial generation is a strong sense of irony. The elements that make shitposting particularly relatable extend beyond irony, but irony is fundamental to understanding the humor of this generation, and therefore fundamental to understanding shitposting.
Irony as a form of social interaction and humor is most fundamentally centered around acting like one enjoys some subject, while simultaneously understanding that no one can or should enjoy that subject (Burnett). Irony has become a critical part of navigating social interaction with millenials, and a misunderstanding of the irony at play in a situation can render it completely baffling to an outsider. The question is, why has this socializing system gained so much popularity? Why not transparently like what one likes, and dislike what one dislikes?
6 The answer is that millenials as a whole feel very vulnerable, and irony is a form of humor which allows the participant to protect themselves from vulnerability in multiple ways. Irony is an in-joke. To participate, one needs to know what deserves to be a subject of disparagement, and one needs to know how to skillfully project their disparagement masked as genuine interest to the rest of the group. In this way, irony can easily become and expression of superiority for its participants, where those in the know are allowed to be secure in their knowledge of the underlying reality of the situation, regardless of what airs the group is projecting. On another level, irony allows participants to comfort their emotional vulnerability by cocooning their genuine selves in put-upon personas. This is a tool utilized by many social situations, but it is exaggerated with irony such that the awareness of the persona becomes part of the joke. Irony is a way to mix layers of authentic and inauthentic emotions such that millenials still communicate clearly with their peers, but feel comforted and protected while doing so.
One might wonder why it is that irony has become such a staple in millennial culture—why it is that millenials as a whole feel such a sense of insecurity that they require ironic humor to feel comfortable socially. The truth is, millenials are coming of age in a time of huge financial distress, the crippling but necessary expense of high education, and widespread unemployment (Bors). Student debt has exceeded a trillion dollars, unpaid internships are becoming and insurmountable hurdle to establishing a career, and the discrepancy between the one percent and the rest of the country continues to grow (Bors). Its a terrifying time to be a young adult entering a failing capitalist society, and millenials are seeking consolation anywhere they can. Irony fulfills this role, and, in a more niche sense, so does shitposting.
7 Shitposting extends and refines the function of irony. The tone of shitposting is very often angry and emotional, and the most popular posts from @Horse_ebooks,
@dril, and Shitpost Generator are often those that present emotional distress.
Shitposting allows for an expression of fear and fragility which is masked not only by ironic enjoyment, but also by near incomprehensibility. Posts that appear to be complete nonsense for the sake of nonsense can upon further inspection be tied back to the sources of anxiety and pressure in the lives of their audience.
@Horse_ebooks’ most popular posts include “Everything happens so much,”
“Crying is great exercise,” and “Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.”
The somber tone of these posts merited thousands of retweets, and the appreciation of posts like these exemplify what shitposting is about. The phrases don’t make sense, but somehow they do, and they are allowed to speak to a vast sadness while still being funny. Retweeters are allowed to ironically appreciate these poignant statements, made by a robot, while on another level allowing the expression of existential sadness to resonate with them. It is no accident that the wildly popular @Horse_ebooks is a spambot designed to sell a product. That fact only serves to make the posts more poignant. When it came out that the account had been taken over by Bakilla,
@Horse_ebooks mass of followers felt disillusioned and betrayed (Austin). The fact that
@Horse_ebooks literally is mechanized capitalism allows nonsense phrases to be tied to the real world, and the vast dread occasionally, accidentally, expressed by this machine is recognized by users who feel this same same mechanized capitalism taking its toll on their real lives, and this same vast dread rising out of it.
8 @dril, too, produces content which at first glance appears to be meaningless and disconnected with reality, but by looking at his most popular posts, we can recognize a motif of financial pressures, the workplace, and sincere distress. In posts such as
“BOSS TELLS ME I CAN KISS MY FERRETS AT WORK, BUT NO OPEN MOUTH. I
PUNCH THE FLOOR SO HARD HIS SCREEN SAVER DEACTIVATES,” and “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it” the presence of the workplace grounds the tweet in reality where otherwise it would have none. The absolute incomprehensibility of asking one’s boss if kissing ferrets is allowed is comically ridiculous, but the volatile, floor-punching frustration of being subject to the boss’s iron rule and the almost intangible effect of one’s outburst it are truly relatable and poignant.
When @dril tweets “… Candles $3,600, Utility $150, someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying,” or “the numa numa man just bought a $70million house and im here at the library trying to photocopy a fruit roll up,” or even “stare directly into the sun For Free #blackfridaydeals,” the joke is of course that spending $3,600 on candles is insane, that photocopying a fruit roll up is meaningless, that staring directly into the sun is painful and dangerous no matter how free. The significance however, goes beyond the joke. The popularity and power of @dril’s web brand stems not from silly nonsense humor, but from the combination of silly nonsense humor and a deep and frustrating real-world struggle against the economic machine which engulfs us.
These themes are a conscious decision for @dril, who cites his primary inspirations as @kfc_colonel, @Pepsi, @Pizzahut, and @mtn_dew — all Weird Twitter
9 accounts designed as corporate parodies (RandomMan). The presence and acknowledgement of capitalist pressures in shitposting has always been there in the minds of the iconic shitposters, and has always been successful with the audience.
Whether or not the average shitpost enthusiast is aware of this potential reading of the most popular @dril tweets, the fact that the most popular @dril tweets conform to this reading is telling.
To round this out we’ll look at Shitpost Generator’s top posts. The overall tone and content of Shitpost Generator is different because it is hosted on Tumblr rather than
Twitter. Thus, the content of the posts is geared toward already existing key phrases and memes existing on Tumblr. The process and style of shitposting, however, is the same, and follows in the tradition of Weird Twitter. In looking at popular Shitpost
Generator posts such as “warning: very desperate trash,” “*RIDES MY WAY OUT OF
LIBERTARIAN HELL ON A PROBLEMATIC LIZARD* GUESS WHO’S ABOUT TO
FUCKING WRECK THE GENDER BINARY,” and “just fucking attack a former president” we recognize emotional pain, presented in a ridiculous format, but tied to real world anxieties. It should be noted that shitposting culture is strong on Tumblr, but that shitposts of this caliber would very rarely rise to the acclaim that Shitpost Generator has received. This is the same phenomenon we witnessed with @Horse_ebooks, where the fact that the text is entirely generated by a machine makes it more compelling than it would be otherwise. We’re going to look at why that might be by examining how it is not only the content of shitposts that makes them so compelling, but also the process behind their creation.
10 So far we have briefly touched upon the relationship between these three sources, but taking a careful look will prove fruitful to understanding why shitposting has become so widely applauded. @Horse_ebooks began as a spambot that created speech patterns human enough to avoid spam detection, but was reinterpreted as a literary piece, and was eventually literally taken over to become a tool specifically for literary work. The work of humans Bakilla and @dril used capitalist advertisement as inspiration, but subverted it such that the work presented spoke to the feelings of dread, disillusionment, and disjointedness felt by those struggling to exist in a capitalist society.
Finally, Shitpost Generator synthesized the work of human shitposters following in this tradition to create a stream of shitposts which represented the same anxieties, but transformed once again by a machine. Unwinding this path, we can characterize
Shitpost Generator as a robot emulating humans emulating a robot emulating humans.
This entire evolutionary process has allowed shitposting to develop as an interpretation of the machine not just through the content of the posts, but also through the process of their creation. This process is layers upon layers and humans a robots bound together, interaction, and producing work—much like the real world.
The difference between shitposting and the real world is that shitposting allows us to acknowledge the painful and discordant realities in our life and laugh about it. This lets us confront and process our anxieties, which is in and of itself political and powerful, but shitposting is more than just a cathartic release of frustration, or a recreative pursuit.
Shitposting is a re-implementation and subversion of the system that subjugates us, and a reclamation of the machine.
11 Shitposting allows us to take over and transform the machine from a “demon power,” breaking out into “the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs,” to a tool utilized in the craft of creating and appreciating humor (Marx 361). Sure,
@Horse_ebooks was created to sell a product, but its success and polarity stems from the emotion and humor and art that a collective group of people chose to project upon it.
You can be sure that although the links to eBook sellers garnered thousands of retweets, nary a soul was interested in buying. Instead, people acting as a group transformed @Horse_ebooks from a capitalist machine to a literary tool, which culminated in the literal takeover and transformation by Bakilla. The stylings of Bakilla and @dril are inspired by capitalism, but skew their acknowledgment of the machine such that it becomes humorous, while still alluding to and engaging with a vast emotional dread. Shitpost Generator, the final stop on this tour, perfectly represents how the spambot @Horse_ebooks has been transformed into a literary critique of the machine. Shitpost Generator, too, is a computer program designed to generate text, but it has allowed shitposting to evolve from a humorous re-interpretation of the capitalist machine to a tool which synthesizes existing human shitposts into a colorful amalgamation of our deep anxieties and our best jokes. @Horse_ebooks was a machine which produced our fears while trying to sell us something. We have learned to challenge this machine—and all the machines it symbolically stands for—through the process of learning to laugh at those fears, learning to acknowledge and espouse them ourselves, and then learning to use the machines a tool to represent them yet again, not by happenstance, but by design—and in a design that is truly by and for the people.
12 Shitposting from its very genesis has been all about disrupting the system, interrupting the thread, and contributing a weighty nothing to the processes at play. In a society that expects first and foremost an ever increasing production and an ever increasing productivity—to the detriment of real people—it is no surprise that a form of humor which relies on being disruption, interruption, and meaninglessness has risen as a cathartic expression of the exhaustion in the lives of millenials who are expected to constantly be appeasing the system, continuing the thread, and producing meaning and significance endlessly.
We can conclude that shitposting is a tool which challenges the capitalist regime in content, in process, and in effect. The motif of the discordant workplace and emotional strife speaks to the same anxieties in the real lives of millenials, the transformation of textbot from machine to tool allows us to transform and reclaim technology for our craft, and the ultimate style of meaninglessness, chaos, and non- productivity is a satisfying disruption of everything that the capitalist system to which we are organs expects of us. Walter Benjamin writes,
“‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus,’ says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits,
expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that
has been changed by technology. This is evidently, the consummation of
‘l’art pour l’art.’ Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-
alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation
13 of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by
politicizing art.”!
Shitposting as an aesthetic truly is a self-alienating self destruction, where the honest thoughts and emotions and people struggling to survive amidst a failing economic structure are represented chaotically and taken humorously. However, shitposting goes beyond simply representing the chaos in our lives and allowing us to laugh at it—it transforms, reclaims, and reinterprets the vast machinations to which we are subjected into a tool for art. Rather than stopping at an aesthetic rendering of our pain, shitposting acknowledges and transforms our pain by acknowledging and transforming its source—by rendering a capitalist machine an artistic tool. In the immortal words of Shitpost Generator,
14 Works Cited Mercer, Alex. "Shitposting." Know Your Meme. Cheezburger, 2014. Web. 14 May 2015.
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