You know you're wasting your time typing "kitten" into the Google search field. Guys, do the words "huge tits" mean anything to you?
The beauty of the Internet is that we become our own gatekeepers: We can Google or YouTube whatever suits our fancy with the most rigorous specificity at the click of a button. What's more, we never have to see what we don't want to see. One of those things is the clock.
The Internet's relationship with time is what it has in common with the theater or the novel and where it breaks from the real world. Every word and image carries a message; there's no boredom or lag time between significant events; it's free from auxiliary people and concerns. Everything is a snapshot. And foremost among these snapshots is the demotivational poster.
Games: Best reality ever
The above demotivational poster is one of my favorites. Looking out a window used to symbolize man's yearning for the potential of the outside world and his strained relationship with the monotony of indoor living, but on the Internet, potential is meaningless. In the world of Internet gaming, for example, I can pursue limitless ambitions and achieve virtually limitless levels of success. In the real world, my efforts are hampered by, well, reality. An equally fitting––though certainly less acidic––caption would be, "Games: Best reality ever."
Demotivational posters are the dark underbelly of the once-ubiquitous motivational poster. Structurally identical to their simulacra offspring, they typically combined soothing images with pithy words of wisdom, and could be found in practically every cookie cutter strip mall professional office space. Like Soviet propaganda, it was widely understood that they were emblematic of emotionally fruitless existence instead of a departure from it.
––Which is exactly why they lent themselves so perfectly to the Internet meme. It was easy to imagine their color-retouched landscapes replaced with Darth Vader or a squirrel doing a backflip over a snarky caption, and almost as easy to construct on one's computer. There are even generators online.
I haven't seen a motivational poster in years, and I suspect that the demotivational poster meme has actually supplanted its source material in a weird example of Baudrillard's theory of the precession of the simulacrum. Whatever the case, nobody will ever look at an authentic motivational poster and see anything but a quaint holdout against a now overwhelmingly ironic medium. Their disappearance from the workplace tells us that the uninspired propagandists of America's vast cubicle halls have been beaten.
But beaten by what, exactly? Beyond the structural demands of the motivational poster (a black matte, a photo, and a caption in plain white font), there are no set rules for the content of a demotivational poster. Sure, it helps that the caption and photo are funny and relate to one another in some humorous way, but if "Bear Cavalry" is any indication, there's little need for a sense of humor beyond an easy amusement with the absurd.
As the potheads at highdeas.com correctly point out, "Bear Cavalry" is a hilarious and original idea, and you just know some illustrator had a field day sketching out the salty Cossacks and their Kalashnikovs and Thompson guns. It was only a matter of time until the Internet nerd corps did what it habitually does with a genuine novelty: try to one-up it.
Enter a parade of infinite escalation. "Gorillas in Power Armor," "Cat Snipers," "Raptor Cavalry"––these aren't just rip-offs of the original; they're in a kind of dialogue with "Bear Cavalry," sometimes mentioning it by name. While the demotivational poster replaced its predecessor, eventually destroying it, "Bear Cavalry" spawned generations of the like that play off of absurd, animal-populated military themes in much the same way original comments are preserved on a message board, no matter how many responses they generate.
The Internet's structure has a high degree of self-similarity. Like cloud formations, coastlines, and Jackson Pollock paintings,* blogs, aggregates and fora use self-reference and interconnectivity to produce structural similarity regardless of the scale on which it's perceived. The "Bear Cavalry" poster began as a call into the ether of the Internet––fanboy wit set adrift like a message in a bottle––that received response after response, eventually reproducing something akin to a familiar Internet structure, the forum.
Somewhere beneath the fractal geometry of the Internet rests a bedrock of something resembling culture. I hesitate to call e-culture a true culture because all societies in the outside world hold certain things as sacred. On the Internet, everything's up for grabs. After all, the second response to "Bear Cavalry" (after "That's AWESOME!") was, "What would be more awesome than bear cavalry?" E-culture is defined by its ironic wit and obsession with the superlative, and within it is a never-ending search for the cutest, the most epic, the minutest detail. It embraces the re-appropriation of the old but thrives on riffing and improvisation. On the Internet, these are the only things that are truly sacred (except maybe StarWars).
However, there's a deep-seated aversion to outright viciousness, and there's a kind of irony in that the same apparatus that distributed reaction videos to 2 Girls 1 Cup could so revile the Barack Obama/Joker poster. The culture of anonymity has fostered an ambivalence towards our serious convictions, and expressions of outright cruelty or hatred fall under the category of Too Much Information.
The best demotivational posters are meaningless. Like everything else on the Internet, they digest the material of the outside world while saying as little about us as individuals as possible. Like "Reality: Worst game ever," on the Internet we have full control over our handles, unblemished by our crooked teeth or shabby complexions. We can be whomever we want to be––but we've chosen to be nobody.
––Which is exactly why they lent themselves so perfectly to the Internet meme. It was easy to imagine their color-retouched landscapes replaced with Darth Vader or a squirrel doing a backflip over a snarky caption, and almost as easy to construct on one's computer. There are even generators online.
I haven't seen a motivational poster in years, and I suspect that the demotivational poster meme has actually supplanted its source material in a weird example of Baudrillard's theory of the precession of the simulacrum. Whatever the case, nobody will ever look at an authentic motivational poster and see anything but a quaint holdout against a now overwhelmingly ironic medium. Their disappearance from the workplace tells us that the uninspired propagandists of America's vast cubicle halls have been beaten.
But beaten by what, exactly? Beyond the structural demands of the motivational poster (a black matte, a photo, and a caption in plain white font), there are no set rules for the content of a demotivational poster. Sure, it helps that the caption and photo are funny and relate to one another in some humorous way, but if "Bear Cavalry" is any indication, there's little need for a sense of humor beyond an easy amusement with the absurd.
Courtesy of stoners imbued with a crude sense of awesome
Enter a parade of infinite escalation. "Gorillas in Power Armor," "Cat Snipers," "Raptor Cavalry"––these aren't just rip-offs of the original; they're in a kind of dialogue with "Bear Cavalry," sometimes mentioning it by name. While the demotivational poster replaced its predecessor, eventually destroying it, "Bear Cavalry" spawned generations of the like that play off of absurd, animal-populated military themes in much the same way original comments are preserved on a message board, no matter how many responses they generate.
The Internet's structure has a high degree of self-similarity. Like cloud formations, coastlines, and Jackson Pollock paintings,* blogs, aggregates and fora use self-reference and interconnectivity to produce structural similarity regardless of the scale on which it's perceived. The "Bear Cavalry" poster began as a call into the ether of the Internet––fanboy wit set adrift like a message in a bottle––that received response after response, eventually reproducing something akin to a familiar Internet structure, the forum.
Somewhere beneath the fractal geometry of the Internet rests a bedrock of something resembling culture. I hesitate to call e-culture a true culture because all societies in the outside world hold certain things as sacred. On the Internet, everything's up for grabs. After all, the second response to "Bear Cavalry" (after "That's AWESOME!") was, "What would be more awesome than bear cavalry?" E-culture is defined by its ironic wit and obsession with the superlative, and within it is a never-ending search for the cutest, the most epic, the minutest detail. It embraces the re-appropriation of the old but thrives on riffing and improvisation. On the Internet, these are the only things that are truly sacred (except maybe StarWars).
However, there's a deep-seated aversion to outright viciousness, and there's a kind of irony in that the same apparatus that distributed reaction videos to 2 Girls 1 Cup could so revile the Barack Obama/Joker poster. The culture of anonymity has fostered an ambivalence towards our serious convictions, and expressions of outright cruelty or hatred fall under the category of Too Much Information.
The best demotivational posters are meaningless. Like everything else on the Internet, they digest the material of the outside world while saying as little about us as individuals as possible. Like "Reality: Worst game ever," on the Internet we have full control over our handles, unblemished by our crooked teeth or shabby complexions. We can be whomever we want to be––but we've chosen to be nobody.
*Special thanks to Ian Pilgrim of the University of Oregon for sending me back to Idaho with a copy of the original Richard P. Taylor article.
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