"You take the Internet too seriously." -- you're goddamn right I do.

Look at us! Masters of the memetic web! "did you hear about th--" "seen it. saw it. reddit."

This is mass culture now: Warhol's Factory, at scale in the para-space, (le)terally an Internet-culture machine! And look at you and me, a couple of proles, caught in the gears! Get that piecework done, comrade!

We're Laughs Lizards, all of us, but does that exclude the critical eye? We're Scientismists and love to hate humanities -- and humans! -- but does that mean we cannot discuss the art of Image Macro? We're neckbeards in body (and soul), but must we wallow in our own memetic waste, too apathetic to change our briefs?

I told him reddit was just reposts of reposts and he said "/b/ was never good" -- but does that mean we cannot imagine it otherwise?

What exactly are we doing, anon, in these immortal times -- the beginning of the 3rd Millennium, dawn of the Internet age? We're going down in history, boys, and I do believe “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.” Its an orgy of cock and balls and they are touching, but we haven't hit that Dionysian ecstasy where the C is always O. Whether we know it or not we're casting off towards the great Singularity and we will have great effect, purely by our position in time. The conventions of today are the underground springs of tomorrow's raging rivers! Long live anon!

We went from bulletin boards to the forced-anonymous Large Memetic Collider to being "powered by community, democracy, and you" -- but how do the cogs fit together? And how do we fit to the machine?

These sites are universes with their own physics. Bits of code govern the collision of posts -- our atomic particle -- ordering the matter with which we work: that most visible, disseminated to the collective body; that buried and thus denied affect; that left to languish on page 10 in a mixture of shitposts and hidden gems. That which we produce is as much the product of material laws as it is human ingenuity! What does it mean to have stairs in your house, to habeeb it, to know when the narwhal bacons? What's the difference between goons and anons and redditors? It is not the content which they produce, but how they organize it!

SomethingAwful and 4chan present posts temporally -- newest first -- and thus to organize one must produce. To partake in the practical process, one must personally participate. LURK MOAR!!112! means you don't get it yet: GTFO! But the population explodes and in come the shitposters ([s4s] will u marry me?). The river changes course.. but that's meme life out here in the World Wild Web. SA has archives, 4chan kills its children. Do we get quantum physical about it? Structural elements have consequences for production: to be able to link an old thread, it's magicks compared to 4chan's oral tradition. SA has personalities, 4chan has Anonymous -- perhaps this difference is just aesthetic.. and yet we stand in awe of what the anonymous mode produced! Goofy stall and nosedive aside, with wax wings melting once we stepped outside, we are all still LEGION.

But the machine has changed: reddit is projected at 10% US market penetration by the end of 2014! 4chan only ever hit ~2% in 2011! ...my university voted to name themselves the Narwhals -- shit just got real.

So why the change in platform? Perhaps it was a problem of volume: remember when threads on /b/ would 404 in a matter of seconds? Now Capital has taken over, putting posts onto the free market: a 'democratic' fiat-currency has been invented to mediate the relations of content. Arbitrary Internet points organize it all now: karma, likes, +1s, diggs, retweets, reblogs, hearts, follows -- on and on. The result is a division of labor: the producers and the organizers. No longer do the producers rule, with workers in control of the machine. We are governed by those very lurkers whom we were once able to expel with vitriol and gore threads: those who work the upvote/downvote levers, who order matter, who enslave OC. The memetic network stabilizes, allowing only the smallest of movements. When content is organized by vote the norm is shoved to the forefront again and again! We're eating our own shit!

...fucking Neoliberalism are you seriously going to take the Internet, too?

But that's what happens when you move from the tribal commune to the big industrial city! Sort-by-newest, like the temporal constraint of meatspace, can only handle so much before it hits that anarchistic, fevered pitch -- System Overload, Freakout, the Madness of the Mask. The collective swells, once again, and now even capital has reached its limit. It was a problem of logistics that overcame bulletin boards and now, too, the 'democratic' machines strain under our weight. The ecstasy of this overload is not madness, but its converse! It does not push the collective over the edge, a chaotic spiral off into the void, but it holds fast, its sanity in excess! The collective speaks, now, not with each mouth -- all for one -- but as the Mouth -- one for all. The front page is infinitely nuanced, but only with variations on a theme: everything a repost, if not quite a /u/RepostFromAYearAgo facsimile. We're the hivemind, again, but of a different correlate: not that extreme subjectivity of "fiction and falsehoods," the grandest of performances, but the strict objectivity of /r/AskScience, with all content -- even Truth! -- in 'order of rank.' It is no wonder that reddit fetishizes Libertarianism (Ron Paul 2020!): each new subreddit is a secession from the Union -- a continual exodus to escape the paralytic grip of epistemic fiat-currency. To think freely one must actually leave.

And so the collective congeals and the center reigns, but can we imagine it otherwise? Is it one or the other -- truth or untruth? It is a logistical challenge, but there are new universes to be created and we are all gods capable of tsimtsum.

We must rethink our goals: the objectivity of Capital is not an end in itself! We must overcome our fetish of the tree -- 'post-comment'/'thread-reply' -- let us truly spin a web! We must retool our interactions with scale: where are the Zooming-User-Interfaces? We must lift that filter-bubble veil: down with proprietary algorithms! Let us see only matter -- nodes in a network! Let us see the sprawl of information -- the mess of memetics! Let us regain control of the machine -- power to the posters!

SUPPORT THE MEMETIC STRUGGLE!

VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR!

H. M. Theinert Kommando