Content Upcycling

As proposed by James Giuran, the genealogical lineage between the contemporary online left and SomethingAwful is the index of its anatomy. Identifying their nature to obsessively dogpile, exclude, and harass through the Helldump forum, descends the policing behavior of the left today, the “walking MeToo timebombs” as described by Anna Khachiyan as the histrionic soldiers ready to make callouts and medium posts detailing every perceived fault at any step out of line from an established code of norms. Today, this is cloaked in politics more than it was then, the manners which the victims step outside of being using a forbidden “trope” in their language as opposed to choosing one vice over another (My Little Pony over fursuiting, japanese games over american games), but the essential nature of it remains the same. The important point of divergence left unrecognized however is the distinction between the Helldump and Kiwifarms approach to much the same thing. In both, the subject is made into a counter-body, all evidence and insults being heaped upon them as a grand text of the excluded. For the lolcow style, this has morphed however into a form of obsessive cataloging as shown in the incredible amount of detail of the CWCki, while for the helldump style, this has morphed into cancel culture. The roots of this split are vital to understanding the other and more essential component of SomethingAwful’s role in forming the contemporary left.

Another vital function of SomethingAwful in the 00s internet was the finding of obscure content. Terry Davis, Ulillillia, and Gene Ray were all first discovered in this way. The dispersed collection of users moving across the internet would find them and collect them individually. Putting them at the header of the thread, users would then engage with that thread, which would disperse the posted subject across those users. In doing so, SomethingAwful acted as a network of distribution, wherein one, more obscure side of the internet would be found, catalogued, and then given to a collection of agents to disperse through more proper channels of media.

This formed the model seen today in “Millennial™” outlets such as Vice and Kotaku. The internet is always imagined by the mind of SomethingAwful users as being a place of chaos, a dark continent of infinite horror. The function of their preferred communities for them is to upcycle the internet into safe content. SomethingAwful’s collection of obscure content, where dispersed findings are aggregated and catalogued and repackaged through a vertical apparatus formed the pattern seen in today’s internet “journalism” that does the same, taking the passions and projects of the dispersed bazaar and turning them into projects of the cathedral, gilding them in roman leafing and placing them upon a cardinal’s bookcase for display as one of many in a collection of the same.

For this reason, the helldump spawned cancel culture. The anonymous imageboard remains at its heart horizontal, by denying personal identity, with the only interaction being between the self and the collective. The BBS meanwhile creates a vertical cathedral structure, this training its users to act in a way corresponding with a cathedral. As such, the cataloging of the lolcow took the form of obsession, as users found themselves drawn into a dispersed community centered around the subject, while the helldump’s harassment took the form of cancellation, where the victim is given a trial-by-bullying and ritually excluded. For this reason as well, the anonymous imageboard continues to produce independent projects, while the BBS-left produces pale imitations and “ironic” satires, Katawa Shoujo vs Doki Doki Literature club, the art of an appreciator vs the art of a colonizer.