skibidinalysis
skibidi dop dop dop yes yes
audio version of this post
The more I think about Skibidi Toilet, the more I realize I need to learn.
Over on TikTok, I’m reviewing every season of the show. So far, there’s twenty-five seasons and I’ve done twelve of them. Friends and followers tell me I should do a long YouTube video essay (one hour plus) about Skibidi Toilet, and I’ve decided that’s my end goal after I finish all the TikTok reviews.
So I’m seeing the TikToks as sketches for this larger video essay — notes jotted down, ideas tried out, clues pursued. This post is my halfway-point check in and prospectus of what the final product might look like. Before going any further, let me explain the bird’s-eye view of Skibidi Toilet, in case you have not yet been blessed to know the lore.
Skibidi Toilet is possibly the most popular YouTube series ever. The show is animated using the graphics engine of a video game company, appropriating characters and textures from Half-Life 2. Chanting “Skibidi Toilets” (which are dancing human heads inside of toilet bowls) do battle with a group of “Cameraheads,” beings who have human bodies dressed in business suits and CCTV security cameras for heads. This war between the Cameraheads and Skibidi Toilets is destructive, all-consuming, and morally ambiguous. It takes place across many environments, but usually in a dystopian-looking cityscape. The entire series is filmed from the perspective of a Camerahead footsoldier.
As far as I know, I am the only scholar working in the field of Skibidi Studies apart from the Skbidi Toilet fan wiki, which appears to be written and run by children. If it weren’t for the involvement of my followers, I’d be doing this work alone or not at all. People have given me encouragement, criticism, and new ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to me, and I’m really thankful. Posting episodic TikToks is actually a very good research method — but of course, it all depends on the sincerity and insight of my followers. If I were a larger creator, or if I had landed on a different side of the algorithm, I don’t think I’d be able to work in this way.
To break the kayfabe a little, the real research agenda of my Skibidi Toilet series is to describe not the show itself as much as broader trends in digital culture that I think are expressed in Skibidi Toilet. There’s a reason why this show, out of all the videos on YouTube, has resonated with so many people, and I think it’s because it expresses some key concerns of contemporary digital life in a way that kids can understand. These concerns are the evolution of POV, cyborgs, and the “digital commons.” I expect my video essay will be organized around these themes — there are, of course, other themes you could talk about with Skibidi Toilet, but these strike me as the juiciest. I sometimes feel like reading things academically or journalistically is an extractive activity: you find a piece of media and grab what you want from it, pull the quotes that speak to your angle, cut out the parts that are shiniest and pin them onto your draft. That’s what I’m doing with Skibidi Toilet, and these are the things I’m looking for.
1. POV, and the watching of other people’s watching. The entirety of Skibidi Toilet is filmed through the POV of a character that literally has a camera for a head. There is no sense of a fourth wall — it’s all in-world, all diegetic and immersive. Our watching participates in the world shown to us by the camera, there is no feeling that we are outside of the image. This is what initially hooked me on Skibidi Toilet.
Almost every episode of Skibidi Toilet ends either with a toilet killing the POV cameraman (and by extension you) or with one of the other camera heads looking at it (and by extension, you) and giving a thumbs-up of recognition, of complicity. The literal image in front of us is not from a plane of reality outside of the show’s events, but within them: the image turns grainy when the Camerahead is hit, zooms in when the Camerahead is curious. It is never an image without a motive, nor is it an image with the authority and detachment of a third-person narrator. The image is always showing us two things: first, whatever is onscreen, and second, the Camerahead’s reaction.
So often online, we are not just watching a thing, but watching somebody else’s watching of it. We’re here for the perspective of the influencer, the bias of his camera that shows the charm of his personality. We’re as interested in the behind-the-scenes as we are in the scenes, and much of the artfulness in content creation lies in convincing the audience to participate in constructing an image. In a practical sense — because audience response informs algorithmic recommendation and creators are always replying to cues and discourses in comments — the audience is more directly involved in the creation of an image on a social platform screen than it is in other kinds of visual media (film, television, etc.). And as a spectator, we are placed nearer to the reality of the image on TikTok than we are to the reality of the image on a movie screen.
I’m thinking of those travel or day-in-the-life videos where people will do a voiceover on top of a bunch of footage they took. In those videos, the audience is placed in this position of complicity with the author, we’re with them in the moment of editorial judgment rather than receiving it once it’s all done. This is sort of a false move, because the voiceover itself is edited — but it has at least the appearance of casualness.
Let me explain it another way, I say to myself as I write this, trying to figure out what I’m really thinking. Imagine the author, standing there, and you’re on the other side of a screen. They’re passing things and ideas to you through that screen — this is how a movie or an essay works, typically. But in digital visual culture, it’s often like you’re standing next to the author, and you’re looking at the screen together and chatting about it. The author might just be a disembodied voice, or they might be a parasocial friend. But the story and images on the screen in front of you are less the medium for conveying one person’s mind to another person than they are the occasion for two people — viewer and creator — to meet. The onscreen image in TikTok plays the role that a cup of coffee does on a first date.
This feeling grows out of my reading of memes like Distracted Boyfriend. When you look at that image, it’s layered. You’re not just seeing a woman walk by or a guy looking at her, you’re seeing the girlfriend’s reaction to this situation and then the meme-maker’s labelling of the image. The action in an object-labelling meme is the performance of somebody’s interpretation. When you post a meme, you’re posting a take on an image, you’re asking people to be entertained by your own looking at something. The interesting thing is the way other people are viewing this, not the image itself.
I’m not entirely sure about the following idea, but I want to say there is no mimesis happening with memes. They do not represent a different reality which as an audience we are asked to believe in, nor do they imitate our own reality. Because the interest and entertainment comes not from what the distracted boyfriend does within the world of the image, but from what the poster labelling the image does within our world, memes are contiguous with this reality. We don’t treat distracted boyfriend as a made-up story, the way we do a cartoon. It’s not an illustration. We treat it as a game that people play, and which we watch them play. The image is not a medium for communicating something, but an occasion for meeting over it.
Returning to Skibidi Toilet, I would say that the show is actually representational and mimetic, unlike object-labelling memes. There is a made-up world which we are watching. But within that made-up world, the manner of watching mirrors this meme-type of watching — viewership is not passive but active, the on-screen image is not distinct from a user’s reality, but stands as an occasion and element within that reality.
I think Skibidi Toilet is examining this sort of watching through the POV cameraman.
2. Cyborgs. Nearly every character in Skibidi Toilet is some kind of human/machine hybrid. I think we’re at a point with AI and the internet of things where the cultural image of the cyborg feels less theoretical and more like a practical, lived reality for many people. We are grafted to the phones, our lives take place through the tech, we are cyborgs ourselves. This theme, to me, is the most straightforwardly literary of the stuff I’m thinking about. My plan is to compare Skibidi Toilet a little bit to past cyborg media (the Borg, etc.) but also to tie it into posthumanist theory, which had this really big moment right at the beginning of the internet (1990s, 2000s).
I love Hayles, Haraway, and the other foundational theorists, but I think we need a development of posthumanism that isn’t literary-critical so much as it is historical and phenomenological, given that the cyborg is less an idea and more a reality now. We have intertwined our bodies and selves with machines that regulate biological rhythms, structure our work, fill our days, and mediate all social relationships. These machines are in turn entwined with structures of power, money, and governance. We need to understand how the idea of the “human” has been altered by this new arrangement of our selves in time, space, and social circumstance. I think it’s also important to emphasize that this new arrangement is contingent: it has changed, will change again, and could’ve turned out vey differently. I’d also argue that it’s contingent depending on what kind of person you are, your gender, your class, your citizenship, etc. There isn’t just one kind of cyborg, or one set of cyborg presents and futures.
Skibidi Toilet raises one of the key questions that is on everybody’s mind, and especially on childrens’ minds. What does interiority look like if you’re part-machine? It’s an open question in the series whether the Skibidi Toilets or the Cameraheads have thoughts, desires, and feelings. It seems like the things driving the plot of the series aren’t decisions taken by characters, but larger and seemingly automatic forces. The war between the Toilets and Cameraheads doesn’t quite seem like a conflict so much as it seems like a gravitational pull that makes these cyborgs destroy one another.
There also seems to be no clear differences between individuals on either side beyond things like size and equipment. They behave more like landscape than like characters. The increasing automation of our lives — whether through algorithms, markets, or hardware — raises this question of the place of interiority, and of free will. Are we living in a world driven by human decisions, or one driven by supra-human processes like the seasons and the state? Are the relevant actors in society people choosing to do things, or bots carrying out their programming? If we are part-bot now, which I’d say we are, if not physically then definitely intellectually and phenomenologically, then what does agency look like in the contemporary world?
3. “Digital Commons.” This one’s coming up recently with the events surrounding a possible Skibidi Toilet movie and the DMCA takedowns. In a narrow sense, it feels kinda Boomer to be like, “well, who really owns a meme?” because the entire thing undergirding memes is that you can copy-and-paste whatever you want, and that’s been the norm from the beginning. This sense of how culture works is very different than how we do art offline, and it has a lot of consequences. In some ways this topic is legalistic, but I’m trying to frame it in a way that I can better approach with my expertise. I might orient it around this idea of the “digital commons,” both as a thing that happens and a thing people meme about. The “digital commons” is exemplified by the machinima modding community Skibidi Toilet comes out of, where everybody can use the same stuff taken from a video game.
Skibidi Toilet allows a group of approved creators called the “Skibidi Alliance” to steal its characters, plot lines, and stories because it helps the series grow. It is a product of a totally different way of seeing the creative and collaborative process, one which — because I’ve studied a lot of Shakespeare — really reminds me more of a pre-modern idea of authorship. The plots of Shakespeare plays were plagiaristic riffs on Italian novels he read, the lines were likely refined by actors during performance and tailored to audience responses, the texts were published in several editions that differ widely (the idea of the “authoritative” version was alien to Shakespeare’s textual practice, just as it is to memes).
I don’t think Skibidi Toilet is Shakespeare, but it definitely isn’t operating off of our traditional cultural script of “single-authored media.” With the possible movie franchise now in the works, Skibidi must adapt to meet a legal and market structure that depends on works of art conforming to that model — and, I think the larger narrative is legal and market structures shifting to meet the Skibidiverse and other kinds of media that follow its template.
So, as my Skibidi investigations continue, I’m trying to find a way to gather these thoughts together and learn more about them by really analyzing the show. I honestly believe close, attentive readings of born-digital media are the best methodology for understanding the dynamics of internet culture.
However, I don’t believe I’m a theory guy at heart. But I do think I see the path forward clearly, and want to nail a sign in the ground saying, “look over here.” That’s the theoretical agenda of my Skibidi Toilet analysis. My view lately of my own content is that there’s three points I believe in and can make reasonably well, so I’ll just make them in different ways over and over again:
Memes are art.
Vibes-first, humanities-oriented ways of looking at the world and internet are fun, valuable, and practical.
Surveillance capitalism and technofeudalism are scary, the world is changing, and we need to shape it to serve humans rather than tyrants and machines.
I’m so blessed to be doing this, and grateful for the attention and care which other people have given these ideas. Thank you for reading!