Since the dawn of man we have ventured and claimed land for shelter,
brandishing our superiority over other creatures. However, we find ourselves stagnant in history, not
building immense edifices or conquering lands like the old days. This means we
have no thrive, and therefore we moved on to what we do not understand: the
absurd. As disturbing as the thought may be, the absurd has been a vital
concept in our creative lifestyle as humans, whether we accept it or not. And
the internet has proven to be the big bang to a new universe of unimaginable
confusion and pure chaos, barely understood to this day.
The absurd referred here is the one
Albert Camus describes in his book “The myth of Sisyphus” that won a literary
noble prize. The original meaning of absurd comes from the Latin absurdus
(out of tune), now it means without reason or logic behind it, meaningless at
times. Camus regards life in a meaningless way, yet still strives to finds
meaning in his day to day, ascribing purpose to every action in the moment and
not considering the future as a possibility. The absurd plays a great role in
this book as life itself comes with randomness and unpredictability, making
life interesting on its own; hence why life can be meaningless and still worth
living. It is not about the end goal but the journey.
Camus poses three options to a
meaningless lifestyle: suicide, philosophical suicide, and to embrace the
absurd. The first is the most pursued for, it is the simplest answer and the
easiest to carry out. The seconds refers to finding meaning through other means
like pseudo-science and religion since it requires faith and not concrete
evidence to why our lives are meaningless, as if giving up on finding a truth.
And the third, the crux of this essay, is to embrace the ridiculous nature of
humans existing and marching without looking back or forth, understanding that
we create meaning in the waking moment.
The world wide web was created in
1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Since then we have started to share our experiences to
other people around the world without making any physical contact. The first
understanding of digital comedy comes from a simple, short video aptly called
“Dancing Baby”. It is a baby standing straight while he flails his hands in the
air and shakes his hips with a black background. This is the first viral video
posted in the newly begun internet, shared on the year 1996. From then on it has become
an ordeal to understand or comprehend anything that crosses the screens and
monitors. The video itself has not inherent meaning behind it, just a baby
dancing to music while we laugh and giggle at the nonsensical nature of it.
Absurdity on the internet is filled with satire and irony, having layers
upon layers of it. This is one of the reasons why it is often incomprehensible
to understand them at all. At its core, the internet is fueled by confusion and
anonymity, creating a chaotic environment and lawless land of vast
opportunities to exploit and explore. Sure, there are technical rules like
copyright system and judiciary legalities, but at face value the internet is
mostly an oil pocket waiting to be mined. We are constantly pushing boundaries,
finding what is acceptable or what is deplorable, and with the express intent
of joy and escape from the real-life occurrences.
In that same vein, Comedy has gone a
long way from fart jokes and slapstick. Nowadays, however, our sense of comedy
was warped to several degrees of either irony or illogical comedy, sometimes
satire rears its neck causing controversy with its ambiguity. We either laugh
due to how meaningless the concept is, giggle to how dark the joke can be to
others, or merely cackle at how a digital fan gets turned on in a GIF (Graphic
Interchange Format, which are short, repeating, videos without audio). Comedy
has no concrete meaning on the internet for we have devolved and destroyed any
understanding of what is funny and what is not. It’s not about crossing lines
but subverting the expectations and making the observer question how is this
funny. Here is where the absurd according to Camus comes in; the younger
generations have come to accept this absurdness and often times subvert it
further to confuse the next person to see.
Memes are the primary means to deliver comedy through the internet, but
what are they really? Memes are concepts or ideas that spread through a niche,
only understood by those in the “know”, making it confusing to those that do
not know the purpose or meaning. The year 2008 had brought a fresh view as to
what memes can be: trolly, cringe, and LOL (laugh out loud) worthy. The years
after show growth and evolution. The last five years, however, have been a
complete derailment from what used to be understood as a meme. Saturated images
with base-boosted audio and randomized captions are the new creations of the
absurd, and still we accept them and laugh at how we yet to understand them at
all. Memes comes in several mediums such as videos and images, which broadens
the amount of potential comedy that can be expounded upon.
Music needs no introduction for we have listened to and created it for
millennia. Over the years there have been some that experiment with music to
the degree that it sounds terrible. In the recent years, the internet has taken
upon itself the labor of actively going against any set of rules and theory
when it comes to music. Awkward tempos, cringe-inducing melodies, and some even
musicalize the beats of an animal hitting a drum for comical purposes.
Nevertheless, this also brings new concepts to the table that improve upon old
and antiquated views on how music is played, creating new chords, vivacious
syncopation, and even better the experience of songs of the old. In this
sense, music is both absurd and useful, and we accept both as truth in the
grand scheme of the internet (those that care, anyways).
Music can be used to aid comedy, creating a new format of memes. Often
times images becomes stale and require an auditory medium to enhance the
experience of the meme, hence the example of the lettuce. Entire songs have
been defined as memes in their own right, such examples are Rick Astley’s
“Never gonna give you up” (Rick Rolling, the act of sending the music video as
a jest), Smash Mouth’s “All-star”, and the oh-so iconic Harlem Shake. Sometimes
it’s snippets of soundtracks from movies, shows, video games, and other videos
like the closing melody of Windows systems, the Mortal Kombat fighting theme,
The X-files’ intro theme, and so on. These are songs that can give a chuckle by
just hearing the first verse of the starting melody, and some even give context
to what the image merely shows, enabling a greater experience overall.
The relation between words and images carries such weight that by merely
showing the image of a lettuce and base-boosting the audio while saying the
word lettuce, it will make some chuckle, smile, and laugh. There is no
necessity to understand the meaning to why or what, but to understand and
accept that it is an absurd image on the internet. The reverberating noise of
the word beans as the saturated image of a group of friends is presented should
not, in any capacity, give anyone laughter, and yet when shared to some
individuals we will see them giggle like 5-year-olds doing a prank. The concept
of the absurd has no boundaries on the internet, and it can mean anything to
anyone.
Art may be subjective, and the internet clearly proves to be that.
Artists have come to join this movement of the absurd as well as accepting the
ridiculous nature of it all, brandishing their own art as a mockery of the
rules imposed in the past. The irony has gone so far as to become the new norm
in the contemporary art movement where it gives more depth to the artist and
their work. Banksy, a British artist, revels on his absurdist takes, taking
jabs at the hypocritical visions of false artistry, and completely destroying
art pieces as a way to show how illogical it is.
Up and coming movements such as the NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have been
scrutinized and mocked to hell and back. The concept of over-paying for an
image that anyone can copy whilst not infringing in any copyright law has
brought upon a new age of art mockery. It goes like this; someone posts their
image in the blockchain claiming that their image has value and therefore
people bid or buy so they have the title of first owner. Once that person buys
it, it is in their possession but the internet being the internet they prefer
“stealing” the image and not paying the ridiculous amount for being the “first
owner” of the piece.
Among all of the art genres literature is both the most complex and
least seen on the internet, mostly due to the intricacies it requires to
become a successful writer in the first place. It is not an easy feat to put
out a cohesive story that involves the absurdity of the internet and a story to
follow. The early stages of the internet provided several platforms for
creatives minds to express their wordage; some these are, and were, Wattpad, Tumblr, deviantart (though this last one focused on the artistic aspect). Here
is where fanatics of any concept expressed how they viewed their shows, movies,
and books and gave them a fictional twist. The aptly known fanfiction
community.
They are not as prevalent now, but in the between stages of the years
2000 and 2010, fanfictions were rampant without regard of who it was, mixing
and matching characters to others, even if the canon of the series prohibits
it. The book Twilight opened the gates to fanfiction like any other, creating
debates and sparking controversies like none other. Literature is where we
push absurdity to the brink, no bars held, often being the most absurd element
on the internet.
This, of course, means that there is a dark side to literature and its
boundary-pushing nature. Although fanfiction can be light-hearted for the most
part, it doesn’t stop writers from going wild and creating erotica and smut.
Erotic literature can be a genre in of itself but when applied to how fan
interact with their beloved characters, there is a sense of uneasiness and
disgust. Not just the act of forcing nonconsensual acts upon them, but sometimes
writing their own fantasies and self-inserting themselves as a way to live this
fictional life they will never be able to experience. Sexual topics are not
always the purpose, other use violence and gore, like torture and taboo
subjects.
The other side, however, is not so bad; just concerning. There is no
good side to the absurdity on the internet and literature is no exception.
Amongst a pandemic, the internet did its best to cope, and what other way than
to write a fictional story of how the personification of the virus had a sexual
interaction with a scientist (Kissing the Coronavirus). This also involves the
birth of Creepy pastas and SCPs. Creepy pasta are urban horror stories that no
one can either verify or confirm to be true or false, and thereby being scary,
such as Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, and the Russian Sleep Experiment. The SCP
Foundation (Special Containment Procedure) is a fictional group of stories and canonical
information on cryptical creatures both dangerous and harmless to humans,
creating a universe of categorized monsters and their lethality, as well as how
they affect the world we inhabit in a fictional sense.
It would be nearly impossible to chronologically document every aspect
of the internet to prove the point of this essay but bringing up certain
aspects can lighten the load. Although brief, the internet has a constant
traffic that comes from every country with available service and maintained
servers, and the number of videos or statuses shared on the daily basis are
impossible to track down. However, we can generalize the culture the internet
breeds as well as infer the deaths and births of moments that change the
history of the world wide web in vivid detail. What we yet to understand or
comprehend is the prediction of what comes next due to the variable nature of
the absurd.
The older generation has gotten accustomed to everything being at face
value that the mere idea of something being absurd confuses them and often
times gets them mad for not understanding. They refuse to understand the
cultured bred by the absurd because it would mean that they concede and value
what the younger generation can provide; contrary to the popular believe that
the older the people the wiser. The absurd comes with its drawbacks as only few
care to understand and propagate its meaningfulness to the world but due to its
nature it is impossible for everyone to admire it.
As mentioned before, the absurd on the internet has two sides: the
chaotic good and the chaotic evil. These are alignments that describe how the
landscape of this term is seen on every corner you encounter a community or a
niche. There are those that choose to use the absurd for comedic and parodical
purposes like making fun videos and editing images for the sole reason of
making others laugh. The other side concerns the fearsome nature that a group
of individuals on the internet and their desire to bring down any establishment
if pushed hard enough. An example of the absurdity of chaotic evil would be
hackers DDoSing (Distributed Denial of Service) a political online page because
it would be wacky or absurd to mess with political parties.
But why is the absurd our way of coping on the internet? Maybe because
we have become an absurdist society unconsciously. Due to the amount of
information bombardment reaching our brains on a daily basis, both good and bad
information, it has rewired our thinking into separating and compartmentalizing
into what we can cope with and what we cannot. See for example war; we would
rather have a fit of laughter than to wallow in a pit of despair as a needless
fight arises. Another reason could be how some stories from fantasy-based books
have come to be too real, such as the oppression found in Orwell’s 1984. We
have found everything so real that it seems absurd and therefore inherently
joke around the subject of absurdity, eventually accepting it, like the five
stages of grief. We denied the possibility, we got angry, we bargained for it
not to be true, there was a lull of sadness, and finally, in the digital age of
1’s and 0’s, we have come to accept absurdity as one with our emotions.
We use absurdity on the internet to cope with the ever-growing
existential dread of any potential war or politically inclined chaotic outbursts
that threatens the livelihood of those below living means. We have been so
threatened that we absentmindedly avoid it by mocking the reality of it,
eventually become a parody of its true self. As Abert Camus said in his already
referred book “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him
his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this
confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the
world.”