skibidialectical materialism

violent whimsy, Frankfurt school

Dear readers,

As I contemplate the intellectual project on which I have embarked in my Skibidi Toilet analyses, I feel the need to clear up some areas of possible confusion.

1. I am aware it is a silly show about cartoon toilets made for children — I am not under the impression this is War and Peace. But there is also more going on in Skibidi Toilet than the mainstream media recognizes. The glaring lack of Skibidi Toilet coverage, analysis, and research speaks volumes about how out of touch the commentariat really is with The People. More of us watched Skibidi Toilet than watched the presidential debates or the Super Bowl.

2. I sometimes pause in my Skibidi Toilet posting not because I have lost interest in it, but because I have other things to do. I have made 17 Skibidi videos thus far, one reviewing each season, and have about eight to go until I review the whole show.¹ The plan is to concretize my work into a long YouTube video essay, complete with citations and visual effects.

3. I am not on either the Skibidi Toilet or the media people side. I am a neutral observer. My view is that neither side stands for any real-life faction, ideology, or political group. If I come at this with any bias, it is a pro-human one: both the Cameraheads and the Skibidi Toilets suck.

A dialectical approach to Skibidi Toilet

This blog post is an attempt to understand the historical situation around Skibidi Toilet. A few days ago, I saw a tweet which quoted something by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) or another one of the Frankfurt School theorists that I cannot precisely recall now. It said something like, “the work of art is the tangible result of contradictions in a society’s means and modes of production, the outcome of a dialectical process.”²

the Dialectic

“Dialectic” comes from the same root word as “dialogue.” Just as two people “dialoguing” about a topic may come to a compromise, so too does history happen: events are not caused by one thing, but are the synthesis of opposite things meeting, contradicting, and altering each other. There is the natural world and the human world, the buyer and the seller, the rule maker and the rule breaker — each of these opposite pairs mutually define each other, and by their development serve to create the energy and structure behind history. Dialectics argues that when you look at history from a systemic/structural angle, contradictions are not the things which make it confusing, but the things which make the whole thing work.

Zooming out to the political economy context of Skibidi Toilet, the clearest dialectic relation I see is between the digital commons and surveillance capitalism.³ On the one hand, you have the copyright-free, essentially libertarian mode of production which has characterized Skibidi Toilet and much of internet culture from the beginning: users exchange ideas, make content, and administer communities around apparently democratic and non -profit-motivated lines. On the other, you have the strict rules and exploitative, algorithmically-enforced, surveillance-based profitseeking of YouTube (and TikTok, Instagram, Google, etc.) which administer the infrastructure that hosts, distributes, and curates Skibidi Toilet. It would seem as if the decentralized community that produces art like Skibidi Toilet and the centralized platforms that host it would contradict each other, but that’s not the case.

Without either end of the equation, there would be no Skibidi Toilet. And in our contemporary internet, situations have evolved such that the two sides need one another: if there were no centralized, control-oriented apparatus like a social media platform, the content creators would A) have no way to share their content and gain an audience, and B) would not be able to scavenge the elements needed to create their art, which is generally characterized by pastiche and collage. Similarly, without a pool of creators and fans working for free to generate content and, more importantly, data, the surveillance apparatus would starve, since there would be nothing to watch on YouTube.

Approached from such an angle, the meaning of the text is not limited to “what DaFuqBoom intended or understood,” but rather broadens to include the various contradicting forces which Skibidi Toilet represents. A dialectical reading supposes that Skibidi Toilet represents these forces the way the line and blip of the heart monitor represent blood circulating in the body.

A dialectical reading also supposes another thing: that whether people are consciously aware of it or not, these forces are a big part of what they are seeking to understand when they watch Skibidi Toilet. Like any myth, there is a truth embodied in the images and symbols. Part of the beauty and effectiveness of a work of art stems from its capacity to dramatize or illuminate the contradictions inherent in its mode of production — which are, viewed more broadly, the modes of production for meaning in a society.

Machinima and YouTube Poop as avant-garde art practices

Skibidi Toilet’s aesthetic lineage epitomizes the contradictions of the YouTube mode of production. The show is made on the software Source Filmmaker, which scavenges borrowed assets and mechanics from video games and allows users to creatively repackage these elements into their own creations. People have been using Source Filmmaker (and its ancestor Garry’s Mod) for decades to create animated videos called “machinima” online (the term refers to the use of a video game’s engine and assets, its “machine,” to create “cinema.”)

Like much of meme and internet culture, the machinima tradition and related genres like YouTube Poop (YTP) are defined by an anti-capitalist ethos familiar from Web 1.0. In communities that create this content, there is no exchange going on beyond the exchange of ideas. The childlike purity of the social world created by users who are here recreationally rather than professionally is what gives movements like machinima and YTP their “juice.” Taken from a rigidly materialist standpoint, the passion of posters can be read as the “unpaid labor” upon which the profits of social media companies rest — as critics like Tiziana Terranova have said.⁴

An important element of this creative world is its disregard for intellectual property and large corporations. The creation of a several-minute YouTube video of copyrighted characters (like the Super Mario characters, who are often the central figures in YTP videos) edited in an avant-garde style according to a decidedly anti-mainstream and off-putting set of aesthetic principles is fundamentally political.⁵ Like Dadaism or Pop Art, YTP finds its aesthetics in shocking the dominant bourgeouis sensibilities, reveling in fart jokes and absurd nonsensicalness. But the political project of YTP and machinima YouTubers is perhaps more coherent and durable than that of the Dadaists or Pop Art, because it has involved the construction of new forms of counter-institution organized upon decentralized networks and collectively-run projects — the digital commons.

These two previous avant-garde art movements (Dada and Pop Art) were co-opted into the larger capitalist structure of dealers, appraisers, and collectors, participating in the mode of production inherent to bourgeois capitalism: the market, which turned works of art into assets. But the avant-garde productions of YTP and machinima YouTubers have been grafted onto a different mode of production, that of the surveillance capitalist platform, which has turned pieces of art into content. I don’t see Skibidi Toilet getting a bajillion views as any less or more co-opted than when Andy Warhol’s can of soup sells for a bajillion dollars at a Sotheby’s auction. It’s simply a different form of co-optation, because we are talking about two distinct (although closely related) macro-structures for the coordination of discourse and economic life.

What would Adorno think of Skibidi Toilet?

Theodor Adorno would’ve hated Skibidi Toilet, just like he famously hated jazz.⁶ But I think the Frankfurt School, of which he was a part, offers an interesting theoretical roadmap by which to approach Skibidi Toilet. For the Frankfurt School, which aimed to apply just this sort of dialectical approach to culture, there were two big problems to deal with: the first was mass media, Hollywood, radio, the absorption of art by the mass market — what Adorno termed “the culture industry.” The second was fascism.

Part of why Adorno preferred classical music to jazz was racism and ignorance, but another part of it ties back to his theoretical project. Jazz emerges in the early twentieth century and the music is meant for dance-halls, for radio play, for discs people can buy at the store with their disposable income. The demands of this political-economic context shape the form of the art (things like “singles” and “albums,” which are not how classical music is arrayed) as well as its subject matter and vibe. Jazz, for Adorno, is capitalist. This is the wrong opinion about jazz.

bro didn’t like jazz (?!)

It is perhaps in cinema that the trouble becomes clearer. The technology emerged around the time of World War I, in the same historical moment as a number of other revolutionary ideas. Early film reminds me a lot of early web art: utopian ideals, crazy stuff (Eisenstein) and theorization around restructuring narrative to serve a new kind of human.⁷ And yet, Adorno watched film become a tool of odious political causes such as fascism. Movies (particularly American ones) also reflected the values and exploitative structures that undergirded capitalist society as much as they were challenging those structures.

Adorno, as I understand him, goes on to argue that what makes art good anyway is its “autonomy,” the fact that aesthetic experiences aren’t easily classified or controlled and therefore carry a fundamental resistance to dominant social structures. A good piece of art, to Adorno, suggests a world that is not limned by the forces that led to the work of art’s production. A bad piece of art seeks to paper over and minimize the contradictions, lulling an audience into complicity.

Is Skibidi Toilet counter-revolutionary?

Returning to Skibidi Toilet, I am inclined to say it is politically “good” in the sense that it exposes the absurdity of both forces which are involved in its creation. The central dynamic of the series is the arms race between the Skibidi Toilets and the media headed people. A rational scientific process on both sides results in the construction of endless and increasingly powerful permutations of both Skibidi Toilets and media titans. Technological progress produces neatly classifiable and predictable outcomes: ever-larger and ever-more complicated super soldiers, still composed of recognizable parts. To me, this process mirrors the progress of surveillance capitalism and technology. Google and Apple produce ever-more logical and sophisticated devices for conquering social problems.

Skibidi good

However, this supposedly-rational process is subordinated to the id-oriented violent whimsy of Skibidi Toilet — which comes from the machinima side. It is a foregone conclusion that any new robot created in one season of Skibidi Toilet will be destroyed in the next, and whatever happens, the gizmo remains a toilet. Its destruction happens through relentlessly graphic and inventively-choreographed violence that is not recognized as such by YouTube’s content moderation because it is happening to machines rather than to flesh-and-blood beings.

Every cyborg is doomed. The outcome is the same whether it’s a flying laser-eyed toilet bomber helicopter in Episode 70 or a toilet with one little propellor engine in Episode 10. None of the innovation matters. Why then is so much of DaFuqBoom’s effort (and the fandom’s effort) committed to devising, naming, classifying, ranking, and evaluating the newest innovations in robot technology on each side, if all these robots only exist to be destroyed?

The point must be the repetitive reinforcement of a single principle: there is an irrational, chaotic force that reigns supreme over all technical and teleological practice. The elaborateness of the robots and the audience’s fetishistic investment in classifying them serves to make their eventual destruction that much sweeter because it demonstrates the power of chaotic id energy to overcome even the strongest of rationalistic constructions.

In this sense, Skibidi Toilet dramatizes a conflict that I see as key to the internet and its mode of production. Like the scientists crafting new cyborg toilets, the rationalizing forces of the platforms, with their algorithms and content moderation, are highly sophisticated but ultimately pointless. The deeper and more powerful thing is the violent whimsy of internet users. Technologists believe they are in charge of the situation, but are really being led by their users and user-generated data into a dark hole. Logical analysis, elaborate invention, and careful classification never beat the general tendency towards chaos. To achieve anything of substance or moral value, you have to think outside the box of the computer and relate on a human level to the situation in front of you.

1. You can check them out at my TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@aidanetcetera

2. The quote was probably from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which is summarized here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

3. I take my term here from Shoshanna Zuboff — I feel like this review is helpful to orient in what she means by it: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/11/04/book-review-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-the-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power-by-shoshana-zuboff/

4. Terranova — https://web.mit.edu/schock/www/docs/18.2terranova.pdf

5. The remix video commonly-recognized first YTP, from 2004:

6. An article on this I like — https://www.allaboutjazz.com/according-to-adorno-a-portrait-of-jazzs-harshest-critic-by-marithe-van-der-aa

7. This Wikipedia article on it is really good - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory