Here's an idea.
We are going to try
to explain why people
don't like internet memes.
Let's see how this goes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I'm guessing that when
we show an image like this,
or when I say "over 9,000,"
the collective groan
can be heard from space, or at
the very least from Hoboken.
Hoboken, no jokin'.
What?
Even I occasionally wince
at Idea Channel's use
of "all the things" or
Zoidberg or Spiderman.
The quick and sometimes
nearly instant aging process
of image macros, snowclones,
and videos born of the internet
has become one of
their central features.
Old internet humor is a special
kind of cringy, humorless pain.
[CAT MOANING]
And sure, all humor has
a half-life 3 Confirmed.
But as far as some corners of
the internet are concerned,
the use of old internet
memes and sometimes
internet memes in general
at all is unforgivable.
The comedic
transgression enacted
by the earnest use of
a Willy Wonka macro
is less like telling a
knock-knock joke and more
like continuing to quote Borat.
My wife.
The obvious and
probably most correct
explanation of why is the
sheer volume of internet
humor that most of us see.
While we all eventually
got sick of yo momma
jokes and "all righty then,"
it took people only a couple
months to tire of Doge.
It took the Harlem
Shake about a week.
Stop!
You don't do this anymore!
As literacy for and familiarity
with funny pictures plus text
and weird videos
has grown, so too
has the speed and volume
of their production.
It's just a thing that
so many of us do now.
By comparison, classically
overtold joke cycles,
like blonde, knock-knock,
or viola jokes
seem downright rare,
which is probably
why you might wince at the
punchline but the form itself
doesn't aggravate the
way a "yo dawg" might.
You could even be proud to know
a good example of an old joke
cycle.
So a violist and a cellist
are standing on a sinking ship
and the cellist falls into
the water and says, help,
I can't swim.
And the violist
goes, don't worry.
Just fake it.
But even with a good
"yo dawg" that's
creative or clever
or novel or whatever,
you see Xzibit's face and
your brain just says, no.
No.
Enough.
I've seen enough.
Whatever you heard,
friend, you heard wrong.
But I don't think the aversion
begins and ends with ubiquity.
Arguably we're
over-exposed to all kinds
of things that don't age as
poorly, and ironically as
quickly, as YOLO.
Maybe their age has
something to do with it.
I mean, the internet
meme itself, at least as
far as we know it, is in that
awkward cultural adolescence
of having been new and cool
only five or six years ago,
when YouTube was
only three years old
and Twitter and
Tumblr were just born.
And as a quick side
note, as far as I know,
Mike Godwin was the first
person to refer to anything
as an internet meme.
And he did that in "Wired"
in 1993, so the idea
itself has been around
for much longer than that.
Or maybe it's that we point our
faces at the internet all day,
every day, because of work,
community, entertainment,
education, necessity, habit.
And it can start to feel,
especially with something
that you've had enough of, like
it is invading your internet.
There is a tendency,
especially online,
to feel like the stuff itself
is wasting our time by being
in front of our eyeballs.
We experience a mental and
visual exhaustion having
to see another ermahgerd.
At a certain point, it's
like you're not even
seeing it anymore.
You're just being
subjected to it.
It's kind of like if "my wife"
replaced your ringtone, car
horns, and the sound rain makes
when it hits pavement, which
also provides some context
for people who, say, watch
a YouTube video and
then indignantly comment
something like, that was the
worst 10 minutes of my life.
My life.
There is a
complicated compulsion
to consume that is reinforced
by tons of online platforms.
People talk about getting stuck
in reddit or Buzzfeed holes,
endlessly scrolling through
Tumblr, binging on YouTube,
or reflexively hitting Refresh
on their favorite image
board for hours at a time.
If these are the places that
you go for entertainment
or social interaction, that
give you a creative outlet,
or from which you derive a
sense of community or purpose,
then the idea that
you are fully choosing
to view 100% of the media
that pops up on your screen
becomes a little
more complicated.
Lots of online spaces
function like public spaces
and, well, you
don't exactly choose
to see everything you do
out on the street, right?
Reddit Enhancement
Suite, Tumblr Savior,
tag filtering, they all
stand as clear admissions
that even the places
we love online
can be sources of jaw-clenching,
rage-m inducing content.
No.
No.
Take it back.
Thank you.
Which actually brings us
to an important question.
Who are these people that are
still making ""[BEEP] says"
videos or heaven
forbid a LOL cat?
Well, so for a while, it would
have been fair if not entirely
accurate to claim that
this kind of internet humor
was made by a particular
group of people
on a few websites, Something
Awful, 4chan, and GenMay,
to name a few, all
of which owe lots
to The well and many
corners of usenet.
But it wasn't like these
people were just sitting
around making funny things.
It was through
the humorous media
that they made that they were
able to outline something
of the core nature of the
group, its opinions about media
and the world and people in it.
In "Comic Relief," John
Morreall makes a distinction
between prepared fictional
humor and the act
of spontaneous humor,
which is what most of us
would call just being funny.
Spontaneous humor,
Morreall says,
is not only more common
than joke-telling,
but also more important in
bringing people together,
allowing them to exchange
experiences, information,
beliefs, and attitudes.
Morreall explains
that spontaneous humor
arises from
real-life experiences
versus humorous
fictional narratives,
and has a natural place
within conversation,
not alongside of
or interrupting it.
To me this sounds
at least a little
like the websites and forums
that codified internet humor
as we know it and as
that humor has started
to transition to something more
closely resembling prepared
jokes might also shed some
light on the resistance
to its growing public presence.
I can't help but
make a comparison
to the recent fascination that
the news media and blogozone
has with normcore, a style
of dress that's characterized
by being, well, normal.
Some high fashion
practitioners became nervous
that their steez was
simply a way to buy style,
meaning you want to be cool.
[MUSIC - KREAYSHAWN, "GUCCI,
 GUCCI"]
Normcore, as it
has been said, says
something about where the
power of fashion lies.
Hint, not in the clothes.
It's so simple.
I wonder what portion
of the people who
see memes on their internet
view them as an attempt
by the people making them to
join the internet cool kids'
club.
And I wonder how many
people making them actually
want to be part of the
internet cool kids' club,
and how many simply see stock
photo or movie still overlaid
with bold caps text
as a legitimate way
to communicate their experience
with their online community.
Maybe the internet
humor backlash
is that same old sub slash
counterculture transition
to just plain old
culture that will settle
in however many years it
takes image macros to be
over in the way that
Doc Marten's, tattoos,
and iPhones are over.
Chin beards are over.
Which, for the record, I am
absolutely looking forward to,
not because I want the
multimedia communication
of personal
experience to go away,
but because I want it
to be the norm core.
Sorry.
Would you have preferred
a "my wife" joke?
My wife.
What do you guys think?
How would you explain the quick
and oftentimes severe hate
for internet memes.
Let us know in the comments.
And I feel like any
joke I could tell here
would be dangerous, so I'm
just going to be earnest.
If you are not already,
it would be quite nice
if you subscribed.
But you don't have to.
It would just be nice.
So before we get started,
Brady from Numberphile
just happened to stop by.
And he was actually-- we
were talking about games.
And he was saying something
about people voting on chess.
Yeah.
Like chess games?
I saw you talking about people
voting on the Pokemon game,
and it reminded me that there
was the whole-- there have been
times when like
grandmasters have taken
on the internet community and
all the internet people have
to vote on what the
move will be and then
the grandmaster will
make his or her move
and then the internet
community will vote again.
That's crazy.
It made me wonder whether or
not the internet community are
ever a bit nuisance-y like you
were talking about or whether
they--
Right.
Do you know anything
about what like--
I'm sure the grandmaster-- does
the grandmaster always win?
Do you know anything about
like how the games turn out?
I don't know.
I don't remember.
We'll have to look it up.
Right?
That's really cool.
So that's something to look up.
Something to look up.
It's really cool.
Anyway--
Do you know what?
You all watch this on YouTube.
You probably don't realize this.
Mike really smells of coffee.
I'm just saying.
I can't help it.
I guess you don't normally
stand this close to people.
Just saying.
I wonder what Twitch Plays The
Stanley Parable would be like.
Let's see what you guys had to
say about Twitch Plays Pokemon.
TallGuy61318 asks
why the people who
are stopping the
progress of the game
considered bad guys
when the only thing that
is gained from the game is
just simply beating a game.
And I think that this
also sort of starts
to touch on a larger
point, and the reason
why I feel a little weird about
saying that this illustrates
something about government or
about direct democracy, which
is that it's kind
of a binary, right?
People are either going to beat
the game or not beat the game,
and that the effect on your
life, on your community,
is-- I don't know.
It seems to me
like it's probably
smaller than like political
and policy decisions.
So yeah, the sort of binary
nature of the endpoint
is a very important factor.
Lockpeople suggests that for
upcoming 100th episode, which
I think is in seven
episodes, that we do an Idea
Channel about Idea Channel.
I think we'll take
this under advisement.
Adam Weaver points out that
though anyone could have played
Twitch Plays Pokemon, the number
of people who were playing
seemed to be surprisingly low.
And, yeah, I mean,
I think that this
is true for a lot
of systems that
are just open to the public.
I wonder how many
people watching
Idea Channel watched
Twitch Plays Pokemon
but never once typed a
thing into the chat board.
Jose Wolf makes two really
great points, the first being
that Twitch Plays Pokemon
could never reach true anarchy,
because the game actually
has a kind of ending point,
that there is at the
very least a goal
that everyone understands
as the one to be attained,
and also that people
might have found a reason
to become involved in the
game because of the religion
present, which is-- it's a whole
other Idea Channel episode,
I think, the way that lore and
myth played into Twitch Plays
Pokemon.
But, yeah, these
were great comments.
deathhzrd and a
couple other people
pointed out that in addition
to Hobbes' rather sour view
of humanity, there are also
the views of Locke and Rousseau
that come into play,
which are both also
part of this whole
constellation of things
and really interesting.
So we'll put some links
in the description
if you want to read
about those things.
Yoshirocks points out
that there is definitely
something of an effective
commonwealth in the Twitch
Plays Pokemon community,
because of all
of the strategizing
that happened
on the subreddit that exists.
And if you haven't
seen that, it is really
a testament to organization.
We'll put a link to that
in the description too.
It's really great.
vexbatch points out
that we glossed over
the very important
distinction between the body
politic and the
body natural, which
are both required for the
sovereign to be a thing.
So this is a really great
and insightful comment.
Make sure you check it out.
There's a link to this
and all the other ones
in the description.
Total Philosophy, who also
made a video about Twitch Plays
Pokemon says that Hobbes'
government is present in TPP
through the program.
And I would say that to me, if
I'm understanding correctly,
it seems like to me the program
is kind of like physics, that
like as much as you want
something to fall up,
there's no way for you to
make something fall up,
whereas the government can
tell you that you should cross
the street at the
crosswalk, but if you
want to cross the street
in the middle of the road,
you can still do that.
There is nothing
physically preventing you.
So I don't know.
Like for me, the program doesn't
have the same kind of authority
as government does.
That's just me maybe.
This week's episode
was brought to you
by the hard work of
these authority figures.
We have an IRC, a
Facebook, and a subreddit.
Links in the description.
And the tweet of the week
comes from Dylan Chapman,
who points us towards a
long, so I haven't watched
the whole thing,
but from what I've
seen very interesting
discussion with China
Mieville about the state
of narrative and the novel.
You get ready.
Ready your brain for this one.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And finally, for this
week's record swap,
we will be replacing Steve
Martin's "A Wild and Crazy Guy"
with Tim Hecker's "Virgins."
So long Steve Martin
and welcome Tim Hecker.
