The Internet Makes Us Human

If you haven’t heard of a guy called Don Jolly (and if you also consider yourself an amateur archivist for this sort of thing in the same way I do) I would recommend taking some time to critically examine some of his work. I was first made aware of Jolly through his online magazine Daggermag, which he had posted on the Million Dollar Extreme subreddit around 2016. As was the case with most MDE-adjacent artists at that time, Jolly and a lot of his contributors embodied a recognizable flavor of anime-obsessed alt-right shut-in, which left a sour taste in one’s mouth after any of them felt the urge to start getting political. If I’m being honest though, the epic 2016 pepe shit doesn’t sour enjoyment of the good parts nearly as much as I thought it would. I was very impressed with what I read from Daggermag at the time and, looking back, I still am now.

Although it’s never explicitly stated, the writing on Daggermag was clearly meant to be a sampling of perspectives from guys who fit the screen-damaged channer archetype. Non-comedic authors who wanted to embrace all of the baggage that comes along with said archetype tend to give an impression in their writing that they are giving a voice to the voiceless through their art, showing us How the Other Half Lives if the Other Half referred to incels. Of course, the idea that disaffected young white men in the US were ever voiceless is pretty ridiculous, especially during 2016 when the alt-right was in the midst of its meteoric rise to the mainstream. In the long tedious history of reactionary creative writing, Daggermag certainly wasn’t unique in taking this unspoken premise and running with it. What made Jolly’s project unique and noteworthy enough that I still remember it in 2022 is that a fair amount of the writing was subtle and contemplative and, above all, actually pretty good. The pieces contained in Dagger3 are my favorite and my pick for the best would have to be Wakefield, which is an excerpt from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel paired alongside the anonymous author’s psychosexual examination of young men’s attraction to various Neon Genesis Evangelion characters. The quality writing on the site were the pieces that didn’t overindulge in meme references and inside jokes, but were still able to capture something true and honest about the life of someone who has spent too much time on the internet. Compare the worst thing on Daggermag to something like the daily stormer or that godawful youtube animation Murdoch Murdoch and you’ll more easily see the distinction I’m trying to make here. 

In the years after 2016, Jolly began to more vocally distance himself from the alt-right. Although he was never openly supportive of alt-right ideology, there was a sense that something shifted in his worldview as he began to talk less like a /pol/ user and more like a trueanon type Bernie Sanders supporter. It’s certainly an improvement, although it’s unfortunate that Jolly seems to have also drifted in the direction of the hopelessly stupid “post-left” voices. Despite my many disagreements with him, I think that Jolly is capable of providing good insights especially for understanding internet culture. What I wanted to discuss here wasnt Jolly in his entirety, but specifically a video he made for his youtube channel in 2018 titled The Internet Makes You Stupid. 

In The Internet Makes You Stupid, Jolly gives his thoughts on some wisdom he gained from his time posting on the SomethingAwful forums. The video centers around four “rules” established in the SA community, and it was noteworthy to me how Jolly chose to give legitimacy to these rules. Jolly states that these rules, “come out of the community that I think in a very real sense are addicted to posting on the internet and thus have had, by necessity, to develop certain folkways and adaptations for how to deal with living in a world of constant contradictory information flow” 

The idea of having a set of rules for an internet community is common enough, but I find it particularly interesting that Jolly would understand the rules to function primarily as tools for, as he puts it, “how to engage with the internet”. In most of the other internet communities I’ve observed or taken part in, rules tend to serve as either user guidelines or as warnings for what not to do, both in many cases. Jolly’s interpretation of the rules SA users came up with is that the rules were not so much prescriptive as they were ways of seeing which would inform their actions. These ways of seeing were formed from the experiences of some of the very first people who were ever “addicted to posting” and allowed users to navigate the internet in a way the SA users believed to be a better experience than if the rules were not being utilized.

The rules mentioned by Jolly that I want to focus on are the ones he describes as being the two mottos of SA, “The Internet Makes You Stupid” and “The Internet is Serious Business”. The internet makes you stupid in the sense that there are some individuals who were perceived by the SA community to have some kind of internet-inflicted derangement. This derangement was seen as the result of people getting in too deep, they used the internet like a crutch in some way or another and it ended up consuming them. The first rule, then, explains why the internet is serious business; no matter how rational you believe you are, there is always the risk of falling prey to the internet and being consumed. Thus, according to the conventional wisdom of SA, if the internet is to be used it is also to be feared. You must always be aware that what you do on the internet has the potential to make you “stupid” and the only way to avoid the derangement is if one uses the internet while constantly remembering that what goes on there is “serious business”. 

The second rule is meant to be read with tongue-in-cheek, as SA users believed that the only way to use the internet while keeping in mind that it is “serious business” was to traverse it with a detached sense of humor. Humor was the defense mechanism against being consumed by the madness they saw in others. The example Jolly gives of actually existing internet derangement is the 2014 Midwest FurFest incident (Jolly mistakenly calls it RainFurrest) in which a furry convention was the target of a terrorist attack using chlorine gas. This incident is so fruitful for Jolly because, for him, both the furries and the terrorist exemplify, in different ways, what the internet is capable of doing to anyone if it is not used with caution. A constant detached sense of humor is the only caution you can depend on and it must be applied to everything that the internet presents to you.

The two rules lay out an accurate outline of the way SA posters actually behaved, especially in relation to other non-SA internet users. In many cases, SA posters would seek out those they perceived to be the most deranged for the purposes of what I would call a kind of spectating for entertainment. The furry convention incident is also perfect for illustrating the types of people that became objects of fascination for SA users. Furry subculture is associated with exactly the opposite of the previously described attitude, I believe it’s seen as a peak of the internet induced derangement that SA users specifically sought to avoid and I would argue that furries retain this reputation today despite the fact that their subculture predates the modern internet. Information about these types of communities (as well as more isolated individuals perceived as deranged) was gathered and discussed for entertainment. This is what I mean by a kind of spectatorship, those who followed the rules, those who used the tools and internalized them became spectators to those who were perceived as deranged. The implicit premise of spectatorship in this way is that those spectating are uncorrupted and normal, while those they spectate have let themselves become deranged and are thus objects of ridicule.

The phenomenon of internet spectatorship should be familiar to you if you have ever come in contact with communities dedicated to lolcows. Lolcow is the name that has been given to the deranged user who is the object of entertainment for the detached user. It has always been the case that certain vulnerable people are taken up as objects of fascination and mockery by the general population but, as with all aspects of human sociability, this phenomenon is given new life and transformed by the internet. The “rules” that SA users created can be seen as one of the first articulations of how the spectators within this social phenomenon seek to justify their actions to themselves in light of the existence of the internet. The rules offer a way of seeing the entire internet that inherently justifies the role of the spectator and vilifies the deranged. Through the action of spectating, the spectator comes to see himself as the sole possessor of rationality, as the subject who has managed to hold on to his wits despite “staring into the void” while those who were weaker than him, the poor but contemptible deranged subjects, have fallen prey to madness. The madness of the deranged subject is induced by the way in which the deranged subject allows himself to be consumed by the internet, he allows it to answer his prayers and satisfy his wants. Jolly’s example of the furry convention incident is again worth noting, as the real lesson one is supposed to take from it is that both the terrorist who intended to murder attendees with chlorine gas AND the atendees are equally as pitiable, for they have both allowed themselves to be consumed (albeit in different ways) and have both become deranged. The greatest fear, for the spectator, is that he should let his critical faculties slip, and become a lolcow himself.

It is vital for this way of seeing that the spectating subject remains, as Jolly says, “detached”. Detachment from not only both the deranged subject and the internet, but also oneself is necessary to cover up a contradiction at the core of spectatorship. The contradiction, as you might have guessed, is that there is never any clear difference between the way in which the deranged subject is deranged and the way in which the spectator is also deranged. In reality, to find oneself on either side of this interaction one must have already let themselves become consumed by the internet. The observation has been made many times that those who are most active within lolcow discussion boards have a tendency to transform themselves into lolcows. Essentially, everyone who spends a really long time on the internet is made into a freak in some way. Similar to the concept of the narcissism of small differences, the creation of lolcow spectatorship is an act of denial, of separation where no meaningful distinction should exist. 

The most widely known lolcow is also the most definitive example of the contradiction between detached and deranged subject. Christine Weston Chandler has been raised to the status of celebrity through the lolcow spectator community, and the recent events surrounding her arrest demonstrate a complete breakdown of the spectator distinction. In 2021, CWC was arrested for abusing her elderly mother. It was later found out that the primary reason this had happened was because of a prolonged manipulation tactic by a long-time spectator of CWC. Once this aspect of the story was brought to light, lolcow communities wasted no time in canonizing the manipulator as just one more deranged object of fascination, but few actually picked up on the implications of what had occurred. This event reveals the detached/deranged distinction to be a complete lie. The path of the spectator, far from being the sole path to rationality, instead leads to derangement far worse than any of the supposedly deranged subjects to which they stand in opposition. The CWC incident demonstrates the complete failure of what the SA users had intended with the creation of their rules. Despite maintaining a cool detachment through humor, the internet still made the spectators “stupid”. In fact, the spectators reached a new level of blind cruel stupidity that transcended most of the supposedly deranged subjects they mocked. 

Even though they failed, I believe that the problem SA users were trying to address with their rules is very real. How do we traverse the internet? How do we handle it? The problem with the rules is that they are built on a fear of becoming the lolcow, their primary goal is to separate from the deranged so as to not be made “stupid”. If we want to learn from the past when we create a new set of tools, we have to start with the knowledge that there is no distinction, all of us are already consumed and deranged. Anyone who spends as much time on the internet as you has to be an insane freak and you need to accept that from the start. 

Ok. 

So what now? 

Maybe, if the last way of seeing turned us into spectators, a new way of seeing could make us all artists. What does the work of an artist consist of? Essentially an artist is a compiler of previous things, she selects bits and pieces from her experience, from other people, from other art to create a collage that forms a new work of art. The internet, a massive barrage of information, begs for archivists and compilers to immerse themselves in it. What if this were the image in our minds as we traversed the internet? I remember the way the old communities of video makers who made YTPs behaved, constantly searching for fragments that they could add to their work and never being finished. 

Toward a new set of rules:

1. we are all freaks
2. the internet makes us human
3. global liberation