- Dołączono
- 6 Lis 2021
What is the Sisyphean Model of the Internet?
The Sisyphean Model of Internet Culture (SMIC) Is a coin termed by Forprexxer (me) in my head a few months ago. It acts as an umbrella term for multiple interrelated and similar concepts, namely Triteness Fuses, Objective-to-subjective Novelty Conversion Cascades, Esoteric Appeal, The Cycle of Larp, and their normative corollaries such as Gatekeeping. All together, these concepts constitute an ironically highly prevalent memeplex, which is the intended referent of the term SMIC. Life under the dictates of a SMICcy superego can be described as interestually nomadic, using catchphrases such as "X has been ruined by normies/troons/<users of website i don't like>" to express melancholy over their boulder rolling down the hill, forcing them to find another boulder to start rolling up the hill, ad nauseam through the cycle of larp forever.
This nomadicity is inevitable because gatekeeping fails to address the underlying issue. Everybody has a finite triteness fuse for each meme, and one of the main negative effects of popularization is the drastic increase in the rate at this which fuse is expended. All gatekeeping would do, even if attempts at it ever actually worked, is stall the triteness by fixing the rate at which the fuses burn.
As I just mentioned, popularization accelerates fuse depletion, but what mechanism makes popularization such a strong force that almost always wins against gatekeeping? It's a sociological positive feedback loop called an objective-to-subjective novelty conversion cascade. When someone new discovers the meme, it's completely novel to them, so they will immediately start repeating it again and again like it's the best thing since buttered blueberry english muffins. This exposes even more people to it to perpetuate the feedback loop, burns through everybody else's triteness fuses, and decreases the idea's objective pannoospheric novelty as viewed in the totality of history.
The cycle of larp is thus as follows:
1. An abundance of trite coal and drought of undetonated gems drives abnormie auteurs to innovate novel ideas.
2. The gems that they innovate are thoroughly enjoyed by the abnormie community, but they shine so hard that they end up triggering an objective-to-subjective novelty conversion cascade.
3. Normies larp the gems so hard that they lose all their luster, all of the abnormies who were OGs of this particular boulder have their fuses end up detonating.
4. Repeat.
The secondary motivating factor for the SMIC: Esoteric Appeal
Asides from triteness, there's another etiological reason that people adhere to the SMIC memeplex, especially in the case of non-comedic boulders: wanting to be part of something niche, to have esoteric knowledge. The drive for obtaining hidden knowledge is something that has been with humanity ever since the beginning, when Adam and Eve committed the first sin of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And yes, it's true, please don't go all atheist on me in the comments because you think it was Harambe and Koko instead of Adam and Eve or something stupid as shit like that. The lineage of this passion has a strong pedigree ranging from gnosticism to occultism and everything in between. Lust for the niche to the point of self-enforced interestual nomadicity is just a less bad version of the same thing.
Something doesn't even need to be niche or unpopular in the totality of all culture for it to sate this desire, you could for example take joy in being one of the few people on 2024 KiwiFarms who knows that Skibidi Toilet is kino. This is known as a "conditional niche" or "conditional esotericism."
Positive Reframing of Popularization: a Feeble Attempt at Destroying SMIC from Without
Above you can watch a YouTube short by EtymologyNerd which attempts to counter the blackpill of the SMIC with a copium whitepill about how gentrified shibboleths can be used to inject abnormie political ideas into mainstream thought. This completely misses the point. As infuriating as the malappropriation of abnormie culture by normies is, the rage it induces is just the cherry on top of the whipped niche aura loss cream on top of the accelerated triteness fuse sundae. Removal of the cherry in this manner is admittedly plausible given the current state of the cultural pendulum, but somebody is going to have to eat what's underneath and then get stomach cramps when they go back to the sisyphus hill to roll boulders up it.
Since the SMIC mindset is an antifragile system resistant to positive reframing attacks from the outside, there's only one way left for it to truly be annihilated.
Suicide by Recursion: the Goated Ass Moment when Sisyphus Curled up into a Ball and Became the Rolled Rather than the Roller
Yup. It happened. Lessons in Meme Culture made a video about a meme deeply rooted in the same sentiment which grounds the hatred for him himself. Larp has become an absolute turbonormie slang word, and with it it carries the DNA of the entire subconscious SMIC model. We're finally free. We're all finally free from these chains that were binding us and dragging us as unwilling nomads from interest to interest. Now every abnormie who previously obsessive-compulsively subjugated himself to living by the SMIC has been given an escape route: as soon as the throught process begins, remind oneself that caring about things becoming too popular and getting larped is in and of itself a model widely held by normies. Simply avoid social media, touch grass more, and allow your fuse to burn down naturally, you can relax now because you don't have to keep your finger on the pulse of bleeding-edge meme culture anymore. To continue to do so would be out of touch with the new era we now live in. Larp has been trampled down by larp, and upon those in the digiculturally panoptic dark recesses of the internet light has been bestowed.
The cultural grinder has been fed into itself, it's the exact opposite of a hyperstition, anti-hyperstitially removing itself from existence. Now any time you see someone talking about "we need to gatekeep X" or "X was ruined by Y" or any of the other catchphrases, you should just laugh, call them a SMICcer, and link them to this post.
Fully Anticipated Question: What About the Potential for an Ouroboric Grandfather Paradox Wherein Rejection of the SMIC Leads Back to its Acceptance and Vice Versa?
I knew you were smart and you would ask this question, Yes, it might seem on the surface that rejecting the SMIC due to its popularization will lead to an endless loop, since without the SMIC, the original reason for escaping it is no longer valid. But there is also no particular reason that you should begin subscribing to it again. Rejection of the SMIC is not its inverse, you have no obligation to start intentionally participating in the most popular memes, or refrain from enjoying obscure things. It's freedom from popularity being the overriding factor in your cultural signalling decisions at all. And once you're free, there are other reasons for not returning to the SMIC that you can develop.
Conclusion: The Brutal Christpill that Repetition is Actually Aryan
Feel free to watch this video in order to gain one such reason:
tl;dw/relevant points: boredom stems from the spiritual sickness of depression/having a modern dopamine fried brain, when you repeat something each repetition is in actuality slightly different as you yourself grow as a person, it's always possible to continue creating gemmy OC from old things, etc.
Once you realize that you can just choose to not get bored of things, the possibilities are endless. By using Vulcan mental techniques like this, you essentially DEFUSE your triteness fuse, and you'll be happier that way.
The Sisyphean Model of Internet Culture (SMIC) Is a coin termed by Forprexxer (me) in my head a few months ago. It acts as an umbrella term for multiple interrelated and similar concepts, namely Triteness Fuses, Objective-to-subjective Novelty Conversion Cascades, Esoteric Appeal, The Cycle of Larp, and their normative corollaries such as Gatekeeping. All together, these concepts constitute an ironically highly prevalent memeplex, which is the intended referent of the term SMIC. Life under the dictates of a SMICcy superego can be described as interestually nomadic, using catchphrases such as "X has been ruined by normies/troons/<users of website i don't like>" to express melancholy over their boulder rolling down the hill, forcing them to find another boulder to start rolling up the hill, ad nauseam through the cycle of larp forever.
This nomadicity is inevitable because gatekeeping fails to address the underlying issue. Everybody has a finite triteness fuse for each meme, and one of the main negative effects of popularization is the drastic increase in the rate at this which fuse is expended. All gatekeeping would do, even if attempts at it ever actually worked, is stall the triteness by fixing the rate at which the fuses burn.
As I just mentioned, popularization accelerates fuse depletion, but what mechanism makes popularization such a strong force that almost always wins against gatekeeping? It's a sociological positive feedback loop called an objective-to-subjective novelty conversion cascade. When someone new discovers the meme, it's completely novel to them, so they will immediately start repeating it again and again like it's the best thing since buttered blueberry english muffins. This exposes even more people to it to perpetuate the feedback loop, burns through everybody else's triteness fuses, and decreases the idea's objective pannoospheric novelty as viewed in the totality of history.
The cycle of larp is thus as follows:
1. An abundance of trite coal and drought of undetonated gems drives abnormie auteurs to innovate novel ideas.
2. The gems that they innovate are thoroughly enjoyed by the abnormie community, but they shine so hard that they end up triggering an objective-to-subjective novelty conversion cascade.
3. Normies larp the gems so hard that they lose all their luster, all of the abnormies who were OGs of this particular boulder have their fuses end up detonating.
4. Repeat.
The secondary motivating factor for the SMIC: Esoteric Appeal
Asides from triteness, there's another etiological reason that people adhere to the SMIC memeplex, especially in the case of non-comedic boulders: wanting to be part of something niche, to have esoteric knowledge. The drive for obtaining hidden knowledge is something that has been with humanity ever since the beginning, when Adam and Eve committed the first sin of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And yes, it's true, please don't go all atheist on me in the comments because you think it was Harambe and Koko instead of Adam and Eve or something stupid as shit like that. The lineage of this passion has a strong pedigree ranging from gnosticism to occultism and everything in between. Lust for the niche to the point of self-enforced interestual nomadicity is just a less bad version of the same thing.
Something doesn't even need to be niche or unpopular in the totality of all culture for it to sate this desire, you could for example take joy in being one of the few people on 2024 KiwiFarms who knows that Skibidi Toilet is kino. This is known as a "conditional niche" or "conditional esotericism."
Positive Reframing of Popularization: a Feeble Attempt at Destroying SMIC from Without
Above you can watch a YouTube short by EtymologyNerd which attempts to counter the blackpill of the SMIC with a copium whitepill about how gentrified shibboleths can be used to inject abnormie political ideas into mainstream thought. This completely misses the point. As infuriating as the malappropriation of abnormie culture by normies is, the rage it induces is just the cherry on top of the whipped niche aura loss cream on top of the accelerated triteness fuse sundae. Removal of the cherry in this manner is admittedly plausible given the current state of the cultural pendulum, but somebody is going to have to eat what's underneath and then get stomach cramps when they go back to the sisyphus hill to roll boulders up it.
Since the SMIC mindset is an antifragile system resistant to positive reframing attacks from the outside, there's only one way left for it to truly be annihilated.
Suicide by Recursion: the Goated Ass Moment when Sisyphus Curled up into a Ball and Became the Rolled Rather than the Roller
Yup. It happened. Lessons in Meme Culture made a video about a meme deeply rooted in the same sentiment which grounds the hatred for him himself. Larp has become an absolute turbonormie slang word, and with it it carries the DNA of the entire subconscious SMIC model. We're finally free. We're all finally free from these chains that were binding us and dragging us as unwilling nomads from interest to interest. Now every abnormie who previously obsessive-compulsively subjugated himself to living by the SMIC has been given an escape route: as soon as the throught process begins, remind oneself that caring about things becoming too popular and getting larped is in and of itself a model widely held by normies. Simply avoid social media, touch grass more, and allow your fuse to burn down naturally, you can relax now because you don't have to keep your finger on the pulse of bleeding-edge meme culture anymore. To continue to do so would be out of touch with the new era we now live in. Larp has been trampled down by larp, and upon those in the digiculturally panoptic dark recesses of the internet light has been bestowed.
The cultural grinder has been fed into itself, it's the exact opposite of a hyperstition, anti-hyperstitially removing itself from existence. Now any time you see someone talking about "we need to gatekeep X" or "X was ruined by Y" or any of the other catchphrases, you should just laugh, call them a SMICcer, and link them to this post.
Fully Anticipated Question: What About the Potential for an Ouroboric Grandfather Paradox Wherein Rejection of the SMIC Leads Back to its Acceptance and Vice Versa?
I knew you were smart and you would ask this question, Yes, it might seem on the surface that rejecting the SMIC due to its popularization will lead to an endless loop, since without the SMIC, the original reason for escaping it is no longer valid. But there is also no particular reason that you should begin subscribing to it again. Rejection of the SMIC is not its inverse, you have no obligation to start intentionally participating in the most popular memes, or refrain from enjoying obscure things. It's freedom from popularity being the overriding factor in your cultural signalling decisions at all. And once you're free, there are other reasons for not returning to the SMIC that you can develop.
Conclusion: The Brutal Christpill that Repetition is Actually Aryan
Feel free to watch this video in order to gain one such reason:
tl;dw/relevant points: boredom stems from the spiritual sickness of depression/having a modern dopamine fried brain, when you repeat something each repetition is in actuality slightly different as you yourself grow as a person, it's always possible to continue creating gemmy OC from old things, etc.
Once you realize that you can just choose to not get bored of things, the possibilities are endless. By using Vulcan mental techniques like this, you essentially DEFUSE your triteness fuse, and you'll be happier that way.
