On Forum Rot

Context Collapse and the Degeneration of Online Culture

Communication is reliant on context, where the ability to put a word in the right position to understand where it is in the sentence, what symbols mean, and in what case to use them, et cetera. The internet is no exception, where context is something that is ever-present in online spaces, especially in the world of ‘meme culture’, with how the humor functions. One thing I’ve noticed when trawling certain online spaces is a clear rot occurs as context is stripped and replaced with new context.

An example that comes to mind is the spread of Chan culture across the internet, a place so heavily context-dependent and reliant on in-group humor that you can be caught out as a lurker with the slightest misstep. Do people on the website really care about a faux pas like that? No, not really, but the culture that’s been built there and then exported elsewhere creates an ever-present need to catalog the words, images, and ideas. It’s why things such as Know Your Meme and Encyclopedia Dramatica came into being, with the latter being an in-culture resource.

Encyclopedia Dramatic provides an interesting case study, though in the rot that occurs when a culture goes viral to appropriate from. I wouldn’t recommend going to the website unless you’re willing to see some of the most disgusting things out there, but how they carry out their transgressive behavior is what I’m more interested in. What I noticed was that articles from before 2010-2015 seem to be more generalized in their misanthropy, relative hatefulness, et cetera, like for every Anti-Asian slur, there would be something calling Whites inbred degenerates, same goes for Anti-Black, homophobic slurs, et cetera. Then you go after that period of transition, and the culture is now one that has articles from 2014 praising George Lincoln Rockwell, when a year ago they’d be dogging on him for being a stupid Neo-Nazi who amounted to nothing.

I cannot speak with certainty on this, but as an outsider looking at it, seeing that shift and the difference in how they were authored has led me to conclude that in-jokes and culture cannot effectively be passed through the internet. Part of the process of context-substitution with Encyclopedia Dramatica probably cannot be blamed on one event alone, where oftentimes, when a flood of people devoid of context enter a community space online, it’s always the idea that someone made the “normies” aware, when realistically, people outside the outgroup, like any style of immigration, come in waves. With ED and 4chan, it can easily be laid at the feet of the popularization and memeification of Christine Weston Chandler, the ‘political’ struggle of Gamergate, the popularization of the boards /b/ and /r9k/, and some of Anonymous’s activities. Each one brings in populations unfamiliar with the culture, where, of course, some were able to integrate, depending on the generation and reason for going to the website, but it did start people engaging with a website who did not have the full history or context for most of the discussions and cultures on there.

There are other cases of this of course, but 4chan is the most blatant example, being the place where impact font memes started to essentially popularize the online right’s obsession with agartha. The passing of the torch in online communities, especially during one of these immigration waves, means that the community’s information and traditions are lost. Communities online suffer large amounts of packet loss because there is no way to teach people how to be of a culture online; it’s picked up through osmosis, in-jokes become dialect, something there to separate you from “normies” even if you were just a “normie” a week ago when you first went to the /mu/ board, now happily gatekeeping music taste.

The effort that it takes to genuinely exert energy, to show hate equally, is not worth it when you want the short-term joy of engaging with the culture, where selective hate, lolcow farming, is something that is almost surgical in nature. It is easier to tear down one person than to tear down the world. Even if the culture of the internet at one point demanded that you tear down the world, it can be quickly lost as the guard changes. The fat is stripped away, the information degraded, and the user is left with a need to chase transgression, transgression that has become the norm, the main essence of socialization.

This chasing of transgression, of radicalism, is something that can be seen throughout swathes of the internet, where the joy of tearing down, especially if you view it as a righteous hate, is something that is intoxicating. It’s been something that’s always been part of the human experience of course, it’s why the rituals of humiliation always find new ways to show themselves in new mediums, but the acceleration that the internet provides means that the pulsating heart of this hatred is pounding so fast it breaks its ribcage. The structure that holds it in place is broken and left with a sniveling, near-misanthropic hatred.